man who has not half
a dozen sentences to recite. It is the quality in the acting that
counts. And the manager in choosing Polly for the special role he had
desired had chosen wisely. For it was not so much the girl's method of
playing that had won sympathy and applause, as her manner and
appearance.

And curiously enough, though Polly was frightened the first night of
the performance, she was not so much so as on that evening of the Camp
Fire play the previous year, before an audience of friends.

Polly felt herself at the heart of her first great adventure. The play
itself, the other actors and actresses, the strangeness of her
surroundings, all occupied her to the forgetting of her own
individuality. It seemed as though she were only living out a kind of
dream. Nothing was real, nothing was actual about her. The audience
did not terrify her, nor the lights, nor the darkness, nor the queer
smell of dust and paint and artificiality, that is a necessary part of
the background of stage life.

Perhaps the girl had found her element. For there is for each one of
us a place in this world, some niche into which one really fits. And
though this place may seem crowded, or ugly, or undesirable to other
people, if it should be our own, it holds a feeling of comfort and of
possession that no other spot can.

But Polly had not been thinking of niches or elements or anything of
the kind either tonight or during the week past. All of her being was
too deeply absorbed in the interest of the play and the actors and her
own little part.

At the present moment she was in hiding behind a piece of scenery,
eagerly awaiting the cue for her own entrance; yet she was as keenly
intent upon each detail of the acting taking place upon the stage as if
tonight it were a first experience.

The players happened to be the two persons who had been kindest and
most helpful to her in the company. And one of them one was the
brown-eyed girl whose lead she had followed on the day of her own
engagement. Polly had been glad to make the discovery later that this
same girl had been engaged to play the part of Grazioso's grandmother
in "The Castle of Life." The other actor was the star, a young man of
about twenty-six or seven, who was impersonating Grazioso, the hero of
the fairy story.

The stage was in semi-darkness, while the grandmother related to the
boy the tale of her first meeting with the fairies. A small, shabby
room reveale