ged them both, on the spot! I've never had a rule of
my company broken yet--and I never will! He didn't say a word. He didn't
dare."

"Who?" shouted Canby and old Tinker together.

"Lancelot!" said Potter savagely.

"Who?"

"Packer! His first name's Lancelot, the hypocrite! L. Smith Packer!
She's Mrs. Packer! They were married two days before rehearsals began.
She's Mrs. L. Smith Packer!"

XII

As the sound of the furious voice stopped short, there fell a stricken
silence upon these three men.

Old Carson Tinker's gaze drifted downward from his employer's face. He
sat, then, gazing into the rosy little fire until something upon the
lapel of his coat caught his attention--a wilted and disreputable
carnation. He threw it into the fire; and, with a sombre satisfaction,
watched it sizzle. This brief pleasure ended, he became expressionless
and relapsed into complete mummification.

Potter cleared his throat several times, and as many times seemed about
to speak, and did not; but finally, hearing a murmur from the old man
gazing at the fire, he requested to be informed of its nature.

"What?" Tinker asked, feebly.

"I said: 'What are you mumbling about?'"

"Nothing."

"What was it you said?"

"I said it was the bride-look," said the old man gently. "That's what it
was about her--the bride-look."

"The bride-look!"

It was a word that went deep into the mourning heart of the playwright.
"The bride-look!" That was it: the bride's happiness!

"She had more than that," said Potter peevishly, but, if the others had
noticed it his voice shook. "She could act! And I don't know how the
devil to get along without that hypocrite. Just like her to marry the
first regular man that asked her!"

Then young Stewart Canby had a vision of a room in a boarding-house far
over in Brooklyn, and of two poor, brave young people there, and of a
loss more actual than his own--a vision of a hard-working, careworn,
stalwart Packer trying to comfort a weeping little bride who had lost
her chance--the one chance--"that might never have come!"

Something leaped into generous life within him.

"I think I was almost going to ask her to marry me, to-morrow," he said,
turning to Talbot Potter. "But I'm glad Packer's the man. For years he's
been a kind of nurse for you, Mr. Potter. And that's what she needs--a
nurse--because she's a genius, too. And it will all be wasted if she
doesn't get her chance!"

"Are you asking me