arsal. Please trust me and help me
as you promised you would."

"But the play isn't mine, at all! My play is--is killed--and dead, and
murdered." Miss Adair persisted, still writhing from the butchery.

"It is your play; but granting that it isn't, at all, think what it will
mean to all of us if this--this nobody's play succeeds. Think what it
will mean to the actors in the company. Miss Lindsey was hungry when she
got her first advance on your play, and Bebe Herne hasn't had a part
that suited her so well in years. If it goes she ought to have enough
to make her easy; and she is getting old now--"

"If you'll say and tell everybody that the play isn't mine, of course
I'll help you, and--" Miss Adair agreed, with the tears dried by the
anger and a degree of sanity returning at Mr. Vandeford's skilful appeal
to her generosity, which he made when he saw that his attempt to bluff
her about calling off the play had failed. Mr. William Rooney came into
the box. His hat was tilted on the back of his head and in the corner of
his mouth was a large cigar, which he was chewing and not smoking. He
seated himself without invitation and spoke with his usual abruptness:

"That play is a hummer, Vandeford, if I can just make the dolts put it
across. It is a genuine Hawtry vehicle, but in a new vein. It's a
corking situation and yet rings true. Did any old dame really have the
spunk to put that dinner-party across on both lover and husband that
you've got in your play, miss?" As Mr. Rooney asked the question of
Miss Adair, it was the first time that he had seemed aware of the
existence of the author of "The Purple Slipper."

"It's not my play, Mr. Rooney," Miss Adair said haughtily to the
thick-skinned genius. "That--that situation is--was--is true, however."

"Then it's your play all right!" declared Mr. Rooney. "The situation is
all there is to any play. The staging is the rest. Anybody can put in
good lines. Any simp can doll up the actors in costumes, and one actor
can put the ideas across pretty near as good as any other, if he's
directed all right; but when it's done, the play is the man's or woman's
who made the first layout of the idea--and what the stage-manager does
to it. Author and stage manager, I say. The rest is easy."

"That's what I've been telling Miss Adair," Mr. Vandeford eagerly
assented.

"And authors ought to go off and die until the first night, too," Mr.
Rooney continued to say. "When I staged 'Only An