s Herne.

"He'll get 'em going, get 'em going the whole dame bunch from Harlem to
the Battery," muttered Mr. Rooney to Fido, who stood in the wings, with
his eyes glued to the much annotated prompt copy. "Now watch out for
Lindsey; she's doing forty sides of new stuff in twenty hours. Me for
the stock company to train 'em young. Let her rip, Rosalind!" And with a
nod Mr. Rooney sent his "bet" out upon the stage to make the audience
forget that they had paid their money to see Violet Hawtry and make them
glad to have paid it to see her.

As Mildred Lindsey stepped out on the stage in all the glory of an
almost unbelievable beauty, Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, who sat with his
shoulder back of that of the author of his play, seemed to behold a
vision with his trained theatrical foresight. This slender, powerful
young woman, with the rose dusk of the prairie sun on her cheeks, the
depths of the great canons in her dark eyes, and the breadth of the far
horizons across her broad brow seemed to him to typify the rise of order
in her profession, over which so long had ruled chaos. And as her rich
voice led the intrigued audience from one brilliant scene to another, in
which she reincarnated before their eyes a very flower of the old
Southern chivalry with dash, finish, and lucidity, he felt as if he had
done his best and now had a right to be allowed to depart in peace from
the world of tinsel and illusion. As Lindsey and Height held the
audience spell-bound while the tempted wife dueled with her might
against the tender and desperate lover, placing, with a combined art
that was as great as any he had ever witnessed, the "big scene" of "The
Purple Slipper" among the "big scenes" of the modern stage instead of in
the class of lascivious masterpieces where the night before Hawtry had
laid it, Mr. Vandeford looked down into the gray eyes of the girl who
had had it all in her blood for generations, and who had so brilliantly
given it birth, and felt a prophecy rise within him that soon the
American drama would begin to draw on the wealth of tradition which had
been piling up in a vast storage for it, and that when it did,
dramatists and actors, men and women, would rise to interpret it to a
wondering world.

"Is it really mine?" she asked him, in proud surprise and wonder.

"Yes, it's yours--filtered through Howard and Rooney and all the rest,
but--it--is--you," he answered. "You lost it a dozen times, but--his
own comes back to a m