rion's face twitched. She was living her own youth over again.

There was a pause. Lenore picked a rose to gain time, and looked into
the wings.

"Delacour!" roared the manager, bouncing up in his stall and then
sitting down again.

"We cut it here," said Lenore, advancing to the footlights, "and he
doesn't know. It is not his fault. He's waiting for his cue. See, Mr.
Delacour! Leave out that bit about the daisies, and come on at
'happiness.'"

The understudy came on, and Marion's heart thrust suddenly at her like a
rapier, and left her for dead, staring in front of her.

This was no understudy. This was the original George of the drama when
it was first acted. Marion saw the lover of her youth come on and kiss
Lenore's hand, with the same gesture with which he had once kissed
hers--in the sunshine, in a Kentish garden, beside a lavender bush, with
a bumble bee in it, ten endless years ago.

He was hardly changed--a little thinner, perhaps, but not a day older in
his paint; the same reckless, debonair creature whom Marion had loved,
who had wounded her and grieved her, whom she had discarded at last with
bitter anger, whom she had never forgotten, whom she remembered with
anguish.

The curtain was down before she recovered herself, and the conductor was
waving his baton.

The manager turned to her with some excitement.

"If only he can keep it up!" he said. "Delacour puts life into the
love-making. He makes love well, don't you think?"

"Admirably."

"If only he can keep it up!" repeated the manager.

Through the two acts which followed, the understudy kept it up. He did
more. He acted with an intensity that made the rest of the play somewhat
colourless. At the end of the scene at the Savoy, just before the
curtain fell, he added a sentence of his own.

In a second, before she knew what she had done, Marion had sprung to her
feet, and had said in a harsh, loud voice:

"That last sentence is not in the part."

The play stopped. The hurrying waiters with dishes stood stock still and
gaped, as astonished as if the interruption had been in real life. Some
of the supers at the little tables in the background got up to see what
was happening.

Delacour, wineglass in hand, came forward to the footlights, and their
eyes met.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "You say it is not in the part. I thought
it was. I will omit it in future."

"You will do no such thing!" bawled the manager, leaping to his feet and