t boarding-house, and have her trunk down in twenty-four
hours. In very truth, her days of vagabondage were over, yet the fact
brought her no happiness.

She hunted Felton up at the hotel and explained her absence: "Just a
week-end at one of the fashionable places. No, not exactly
professional. No, not social either. You might call it--providential,
like this."

The morning was spent meeting her fellow-players--going over the
text, trying on the St. Regis costumes, adjourning at last to the
estate of Peterson-Jones.

Until the middle of the afternoon they were busy with rehearsals: the
mental tabulating of new stage business, the adapting of strange
stage property, the accustoming of one's feet to tread gracefully
over roots and tangling vines and slippery patches of pine needles
instead of a good stage flooring. And through all this maze Patsy's
mind played truant. A score of times it raced off back to the road
again, to wait between a stretch of woodland and a grove of giant
pines for the coming of a grotesque, vagabond figure in rags.

"Come, come, Miss O'Connell; what's the matter?" Felton's usual
patience snapped under the strain of her persistent wit-wandering.
"I've had to tell you to change that entrance three times."

"Aye--and what is the matter?" Patsy repeated the question
remorsefully. "Maybe I've acquired the habit of taking the wrong
entrance. What can you expect from any one taking seven days to go
seven miles. I'm dreadfully sorry. If you'll only let me off this
time I promise to remember to-morrow; I promise!"

* * * * *

The day had been growing steadily hotter and more sultry. By five
o'clock every one who was doing anything, and could stop doing it,
went slothfully about looking for cool spots and cooler drinks.
Burgeman senior, alone with his servants on the largest estate in
Arden, ordered one of the nurses to wheel him to the border of his
own private lake--a place where breezes blew if there were any
about--and leave him there alone until Fitzpatrick, his lawyer, came
from town. And there he was sitting, his eyes on nothing at all, when
Patsy scrambled up the bank of the lake and dropped breathless under
a tree--not three feet from him.

"Merciful Saint Patrick! I never saw you! Maybe I'm trespassing,
now?"

"You are," agreed Burgeman senior in a colorless voice. "But I hardly
think any one will put you off the grounds--at least until you have
caught y