wering. "Oh, yes; the only
question with me is, whether I can make it what you want. That has been
the trouble all along. I know that the love-business in the play, as it
stood, was inadequate. But yesterday, just before I got your note, I had
been working it over in a perfectly new shape. I wish, if you have a
quarter of an hour to throw away, you'd let me show you what I've
written. Perhaps you can advise me."

"Why, I shall be delighted to be of any sort of use, Mr. Maxwell," said
Godolphin, with softened state; and he threw himself back in his chair
with an air of eager readiness.

"I will get your manuscript, Brice," said Louise, at a motion her
husband made to rise. She ran in and brought it out, and then went away
again. She wished to remain somewhere within earshot, but, upon the
whole, she decided against it, and went upstairs, where she kept herself
from eavesdropping by talking with the chambermaid, who had come over
from the hotel.

V.

Louise did not come down till she heard Godolphin walking away on the
plank. She said to herself that she had shipwrecked her husband once by
putting in her oar, and she was not going to do it again. When the
actor's footfalls died out in the distance she descended to the parlor,
where she found Maxwell over his manuscript at the table.

She had to call to him, "Well?" before he seemed aware of her presence.

Even then he did not look round, but he said, "Godolphin wants to play
Atland."

"The lover?"

"Yes. He thinks he sees his part in it."

"And do you?"

"How do I know?"

"Well, I am glad I let him get safely away before I came back, for I
certainly couldn't have held in when he proposed that, if I had been
here. I don't understand you, Brice! Why do you have anything more to
do with him? Why do you let him touch the new play? Was he ever of the
least use with the old one?"

Maxwell lay back in his chair with a laugh. "Not the least in the
world." The realization of the fact amused him more and more. "I was
just thinking how everything he ever got me to do to it," he looked down
at the manuscript, "was false and wrong. They talk about a knowledge of
the stage as if the stage were a difficult science, instead of a very
simple piece of mechanism whose limitations and possibilities any one
can seize at a glance. All that their knowledge of it comes to is
clap-trap, pure and simple. They brag of its resources, and tell you the
carpenter can do anythin