ering up the stairs.

Jean cried and laughed, and cried again. Yet even in the midst of her
emotion, she found her eyes pulled away from that appealing figure on
the stage to those faintly illumined figures in the box.

When the curtain went down, her father, most surprisingly, bowed to the
old gentleman and received in return a genial nod.

"Oh, do you know him?" she demanded.

"Yes. It is General Drake."

"Who are the others?"

"I am not sure about the women. The boy in the back of the box is his
son, DeRhymer Drake."

Derry!

"Oh,"--she had a feeling that she was not being quite candid with her
father--"he's rather swank, isn't he, Daddy?"

"Heavens, what slang! I don't see where you get it. He is rich, if
that's what you mean, and it's a wonder he isn't spoiled to death. His
mother is dead, and the General is his own worst enemy; eats and drinks
too much, and thinks he can get away with it."

"Are they very rich--?"

"Millions, with only Derry to leave it to. He's the child of a second
wife."

Oh, lovely, lovely, lovely Cinderella, could your godmother do more
than this? To endow two rained-on and shabby gentlemen with pomp and
circumstance!

Jean tucked her hand into her father's, as if to anchor herself against
this amazing tide of revelation. Then, as the auditorium darkened, and
the curtain went up, she was swept along on a wave of emotions in which
the play world and the real world were inextricably mixed.

And now Our Policeman discovers that he is "romantical." Cinderella
finds her Prince, who isn't in the least the Prince of the fairy tale,
but much nicer under the circumstance--and the curtain goes down on a
glass slipper stuck on the toes of two tiny feet and a cockney
Cinderella, quite content.

"Well," Jean drew a long breath. "It was the loveliest ever, Daddy,"
she said, as he helped her with her cloak.

And it was while she stood there in that cloak of heavenly blue that
the young man in the box looked down and saw her.

He batted his eyes.

Of course she wasn't real.

But when he opened them, there she was, smiling up into the face of the
man who had helped her into that heavenly garment.

It came to him, quite suddenly, that his father had bowed to the
man--the big man with the classic head and the air of being at ease
with himself and the world.

He did things to the velvet and ermine wrap that he was holding, which
seemed to satisfy its owner, then he gripped