*

Roland sat in the cold darkness of the stalls and watched her,
panic-stricken. Like an icy wave, it had swept over him what marriage
with this girl would mean. He suddenly realised how essentially domestic
his instincts really were. Life with Miss Verepoint would mean perpetual
dinners at restaurants, bread-throwing suppers, motor-rides--everything
that he hated most. Yet, as a man of honor, he was tied to her. If the
revue was a success, she would marry him--and revues, he knew, were
always successes. At that very moment there were six "best revues in
London," running at various theaters. He shuddered at the thought that
in a few weeks there would be seven.

He felt a longing for rural solitude. He wanted to be alone by
himself for a day or two in a place where there were no papers with
advertisements of revues, no grill-rooms, and, above all, no Miss Billy
Verepoint. That night he stole away to a Norfolk village, where, in
happier days, he had once spent a Summer holiday--a peaceful, primitive
place where the inhabitants could not have told real revue from a
corking effect.

Here, for the space of a week, Roland lay in hiding, while his quivering
nerves gradually recovered tone. He returned to London happier, but a
little apprehensive. Beyond a brief telegram of farewell, he had not
communicated with Miss Verepoint for seven days, and experience had
made him aware that she was a lady who demanded an adequate amount of
attention.

That his nervous system was not wholly restored to health was borne in
upon him as he walked along Piccadilly on his way to his flat; for,
when somebody suddenly slapped him hard between the shoulder-blades, he
uttered a stifled yell and leaped in the air.

Turning to face his assailant, he found himself meeting the genial
gaze of Mr. Montague, his predecessor in the ownership of the Windsor
Theater.

Mr. Montague was effusively friendly, and, for some mysterious reason,
congratulatory.

"You've done it, have you? You pulled it off, did you? And in the
first month--by George! And I took you for the plain, ordinary mug of
commerce! My boy, you're as deep as they make 'em. Who'd have thought
it, to look at you? It was the greatest idea any one ever had and
staring me in the face all the time and I never saw it! But I don't
grudge it to you--you deserve it my boy! You're a nut!"

"I really don't know what you mean."

"Quite right, my boy!" chuckled Mr. Montague. "You're quite r