ng, imploring,
and plausibly answering severe questions. "Well, when do you expect us
to git this work done?" "We got our work to do, ain't we?" until finally
the tumult ceased, the saw slowing down last of all, tapering off
reluctantly into a silence of plaintive disappointment; whereupon Packer
resumed his place, under a light at the side of the stage, turning the
pages of his manuscript with fluttering fingers and keeping his eyes
fixed guiltily upon it. The company of actors also carefully removed
their gaze from the star and looked guilty.

Potter allowed the fatal hush to continue, while the culpability of
Packer and the company seemed mysteriously to increase until they
all reeked with it. The stage-hands had withdrawn in a grieved manner
somewhere into the huge rearward spaces of the old building. They
belonged to the theatre, not to Potter, and, besides, they had a union.
But the actors were dependent upon Potter for the coming winter's work
and wages; they were his employees.

At last he spoke: "We will go on with the rehearsal," he said quietly.

"Ah!" murmured old Tinker. "He'll take it out on somebody else." And
with every precaution not to jar down a seat in passing, he edged his
way to the aisle and went softly thereby to the extreme rear of the
house. He was an employee, too.

III

It was a luckless lady who helped to fulfil the prediction. Technically
she was the "ingenue"; publicly she was "Miss Carol Lyston"; legally she
was a Mrs. Surbilt, being wife to the established leading man of that
ilk, Vorly Surbilt. Miss Lyston had come to the rehearsal in a condition
of exhausted nerves, owing to her husband's having just accepted, over
her protest, a "road" engagement with a lady-star of such susceptible
gallantry she had never yet been known to resist falling in love with
her leading-man before she quarrelled with him. Miss Lyston's protest
having lasted the whole of the preceeding night, and not at all
concluding with Mr. Surbilt's departure, about breakfast-time, avowedly
to seek total anaesthesia by means of a long list of liquors, which
he named, she had spent the hours before rehearsal interviewing female
acquaintances who had been members of the susceptible lady's company--a
proceeding which indicates that she deliberately courted hysteria.

Shortly after the outraged rehearsal had been resumed, she unfortunately
uttered a loud, dry sob, startlingly irrelevant to the matter in hand.
I