nd beauty and triumph, represented to Josie all that she had
dreamed of and never realised; all that she had hoped for and never
could know. She used to insist on having her door open, and she would
lie there for hours, her eyes fixed on that spot in the hall across
which Haddon would flash for one brief instant on her way to the room
down the corridor. There is about a successful actress a certain radiant
something--a glamour, a luxuriousness, an atmosphere that suggest a
mysterious mixture of silken things, of perfume, of adulation, of all
that is rare and costly and perishable and desirable.

Josie Fifer's stage experience had included none of this. But she knew
they were there. She sensed that to this glorious artist would come all
those fairy gifts that Josie Fifer would never possess. All things about
her--her furs, her gloves, her walk, her hats, her voice, her very shoe
ties--were just what Josie would have wished for. As she lay there she
developed a certain grim philosophy.

"She's got everything a woman could wish for. Me, I haven't got a thing.
Not a blamed thing! And yet they say everything works out in the end
according to some scheme or other. Well, what's the answer to this, I
wonder? I can't make it come out right. I guess one of the figures must
have got away from me."

In the second week of Sid Hahn's convalescence he heard, somehow, of
Josie Fifer. It was characteristic of him that he sent for her. She put
a chiffon scarf about the neck of her skimpy little kimono, spent an
hour and ten minutes on her hair, made up outrageously with that sublime
unconsciousness that comes from too close familiarity with rouge pad and
grease jar, and went. She was trembling as though facing a first-night
audience in a part she wasn't up on. Between the crutches, the lameness,
and the trembling she presented to Sid Hahn, as she stood in the
doorway, a picture that stabbed his kindly, sensitive heart with a quick
pang of sympathy.

He held out his hand. Josie's crept into it. At the feel of that
generous friendly clasp she stopped trembling. Said Hahn:

"My nurse tells me that you can do a bedside burlesque of 'East Lynne'
that made even that Boston-looking interne with the thick glasses laugh.
Go on and do it for me, there's a good girl. I could use a laugh myself
just now."

And Josie Fifer caught up a couch cover for a cloak, with the scarf that
was about her neck for a veil, and, using Hahn himself as the aili