, asked him about them, he
said they affected him as severally typifying the Old South and the New
South. They had a photograph over the mantel, thrown up large, of an
officer in Confederate uniform. Otherwise the room had nothing personal
in it; he suspected the apartment of having been taken furnished, like
their own. Louise asked if he should say they were ladies, and he
answered that he thought they were.

"Of course," she said, and she added, with a wide sweep of censure:
"They get engaged to four or five men at a time, down there. Well," she
sighed, "you mustn't stay in here with me, dear. Go to your writing."

"I was thinking whether you couldn't come out and lie on the lounge. I
hate to leave you alone in here."

"No, the doctor said to be perfectly quiet. Perhaps I can, to-morrow, if
it doesn't swell up any worse."

She kept her hold of his hand, which he had laid in hers, and he sat
down beside the bed, in the chair he had left there. He did not speak,
and after a while she asked, "What are you thinking of?"

"Oh, nothing. The confounded play, I suppose."

"You're disappointed at Grayson's not taking it."

"One is always a fool."

"Yes," said Louise, with a catching of the breath. She gripped his hand
hard, and said, as well as she could in keeping back the tears, "Well, I
will never stand in your way, Brice. You may do
anything--_anything_--with it that you think best."

"I shall never do anything you don't like," he answered, and he leaned
over and kissed her, and at this her passion burst in a violent sobbing,
and when she could speak she made him solemnly promise that he would not
regard her in the least, but would do whatever was wisest and best with
the play, for otherwise she should never be happy again.

As she could not come out to join him at dinner, he brought a little
table to the bedside, and put his plate on it, and ate his dinner there
with her. She gave him some attractive morsels off her own plate, which
he had first insisted on bestowing upon her. They had such a gay evening
that the future brightened again, and they arranged for Maxwell to take
his play down-town the next day, and not lose a moment in trying to
place it with some manager.

It all left him very wakeful, for his head began to work upon this
scheme and that. When he went to lock the outer door for the night, the
sight of his overcoat hanging in the hall made him think of a
theatrical newspaper he had bought coming