should _die_. Indeed, I do not care about places. I think it will be
lovely fun to sit here and watch him, or go behind the scenes with him
and make friends with the other people. I--I am surprised that you are
so narrow, Cousin Roger, when all your own best friends are theatrical
people and artists and you think so highly of them."

I answered nothing to that. The distance between the stage and this
class of cabaret show was not to be traversed in a few seven-league
words. I looked at Vere, who returned my look squarely and soberly.

"You needn't worry about her being here, Mr. Locke," he said. "I know
better than that! But she has to come to me; it's her right, don't you
think? I'll promise you to take her to a better place as soon as I can
manage."

"What kind of a place?"

"I'm saving to get a place in the country," he answered diffidently.
"I'm a countryman, and Phillida thinks she'd like it."

"You?" I exclaimed, unable to smother my derision and unbelief. My
glance summed up his fastidious apparel and grooming, the gloss on his
curling dark hair and the dubious diamond on his little finger.

He reddened through his clear, dark skin, but his eyes were not those of
a man taken in a lie.

"Did you take notice of what I do here?" He asked me, with the first
touch of humility I had seen in him. "I couldn't dance or sing or do
parlor tricks. I wasn't bred to parlors or indoors. But I learned to
skate pretty fancy from a boy up. My folks' farm was on one side of a
lake and the schoolhouse on the other. About November that lake used to
freeze solid. My brother and I used to skate five miles to school, and
back again, before we were six years old. We lived on skates about half
the year, I guess. Well--you don't care about the rest; how the farm was
just about big enough to support my elder brother and his family, and I
came to New York. Nor how I found New York pretty well filled up with
folks who knew considerably more than I did. It was the manager of this
place who advertised for expert skaters, who dressed me up like this,
and paid me the first living wages I'd had in the city. All the same, I
was bred a farmer, and I mean to get back to it. Always have! You're a
man, Mr. Locke, and I'd hate you to think I was a shimmy dancer on ice
and nothing else, or I wouldn't mention it. My father would have taken
the buggy-whip to me, I guess, if he'd lived to see me in this rig. Soon
as I've enough put by, I'll shed thi