past, he had gone forward with his preparations in
the most frigid and convinced pessimism. It seemed to him that he had
become involved in a vast piece of machinery, and that nothing short
of blowing the theatre up with dynamite would bring the cranks and
pistons to a stop. And yet it seemed to him also that everything was
unreal, that the contracts he signed were unreal, and the proofs
he passed, and the posters he saw on the walls of London, and the
advertisements in the newspapers. Only the cheques he drew had the air
of being real. And now, in a magic flash, after a few moments gazing
at the stage, he saw all differently. He scented triumph from afar
off, as one sniffs the tang of the sea. On the morrow he had to
meet Nellie at Euston, and he had shrunk from meeting her, with her
terrible remorseless, provincial, untheatrical common sense; but
now, in another magic flash, he envisaged the meeting with a
cock-a-doodle-doo of hope. Strange! He admitted it was strange.

And then he failed to hear several words spoken by Rose Euclid. And
then a few more. As the emotion of the scene grew, the proportion of
her words audible in the gallery diminished. Until she became, for
him, totally inarticulate, raving away there and struggling in a
cocoon of hexameters.

Despair seized him. His nervous system--every separate nerve of
it--was on the rack once more.

He stood up in a sort of paroxysm, and called loudly across the vast
intervening space:

"Speak more distinctly, please."

A fearful silence fell upon the whole theatre. The rehearsal stopped.
The building itself seemed to be staggered. Somebody had actually
demanded that words should be uttered articulately!

Mr. Marrier turned towards the intruder, as one determined to put an
end to such singularities.

"Who's up theyah?"

"I am," said Edward Henry. "And I want it to be clearly understood in
my theatre that the first thing an actor has to do is to make himself
heard. I daresay I'm devilish odd, but that's how I look at it."

"Whom do you mean, Mr. Machin?" asked Marrier in a different tone.

"I mean Miss Euclid of course. Here I've spent heaven knows how much
on the acoustics of this theatre, and I can't make out a word she
says. I can hear all the others. And this is the dress-rehearsal!"

"You must remember you're in the gallery," said Mr. Marrier, firmly.

"And what if I am? I'm not giving gallery seats away to-morrow night.
It's true I'm giving half