u can
dictate, and I'll do the writing, and we'll work it up together. Shall
you like collaborating with me?"

"Ah!--"

"It will be our story, and I shall like it twice as well as if it were a
play. We shall be independent of the theatre, that's one satisfaction;
they can take the play, if they like, but it will be perfectly
indifferent to us. I shall help you get in all those nice touches that
you said you could never get into a play, like that green light in the
woods. I know just how we shall manage that love business, and we
sha'n't have any horror of an actress interpreting our inspirations to
the public. We'll play Atland and Salome ourselves. We'll--ow!"

She had given her foot a twist in the excitement and she fell back on
the pillow rather faint. But she instantly recovered herself with a
laugh, and she hurried him away to his breakfast, and then away with his
play. He would rather have stayed and begun turning it into a story at
once. But she would not let him; she said it would be a loss of time,
and she should fret a good deal more to have him there with her, than
to have him away, for she should know he was just staying to cheer her
up.

When he was gone she sent for whatever papers the maid could find in the
parlor, so that she need not think of him in the amusement she would get
out of them. Among the rest was that dramatic newspaper which caught her
eye first, with the effigy of a very dramatized young woman whose
portrait filled the whole first page. Louise abhorred her, but with a
novel sense of security in the fact that Maxwell's play was going so
soon to be turned into a story; and she felt personally aloof from all
the people who had dragged him down with a sense of complicity in their
professional cards. She found them neither so droll nor so painful as he
had, but she was very willing to turn from them, and she was giving the
paper a parting glance before dropping it when she was arrested by an
advertisement which made her start:

WANTED.--A drama for prominent star; light comic and emotional:
star part must embody situations for the display of intense
effects. Address L. STERNE, this office.

A series of effects as intense as the advertiser could have desired in a
drama followed one another in the mind of Louise. She now wildly
reproached herself that she had, however unwittingly, sent her husband
out of reach for four or five hours, when his whole future might depend
upo