u did not dreat me well.'

'I know I didn't,' Paul said.

'Ant now,' continued Darco, refusing to be mollified all at once, 'you
haf wasted months of valuable dime, ant you ant I are both the poorer
by hundrets ant hundrets of pounts. I will haf your bromise, your sacred
wort of honour, before I will gollaborate again, that you will no more
blay with me these farces. I like you, yourself, Armstrong. I am very
font of you. I haf a very creat atmiration for your worg. But you haf
not been reliaple. You haf no right to resent what I am sayink.'

'I have some excuses, of which I can't talk,' said Paul; 'but I don't
resent what you are saying. I am very sorry to have kept you waiting. I
promise you that you shall have all my time and all my best energies for
this one spell of work in any case. After that----'

'Veil,' said Darco, 'afder that?

'Heaven knows!' Paul answered. 'Don't say any more just now, Darco. Let
us go to work.'

Darco looked at him for a second or two, and began then to stump about
the room.

'Goot! he said suddenly; 'let us go to work.'

To work they went. Whatever else might be said for Darco, it was at
least impossible to brood in his society. The man's tireless enthusiasm
did one of two things for everybody with whom he encountered. It
repelled either through terror or distaste, or it inspired a sentiment
which corresponded with itself. He frightened timid people; he made the
pugnacious angry and resentful. But here and there he kindled a fire.

Paul's love for work had gone to sleep very soundly, but Darco's
storming awoke it, and in a day or two the new remedy had got hold of
him, and he came back to a moderately healthy state of mind. He wrote to
Gertrude, and she responded, and a peace was patched between them, but
it was not easy on either side to climb back to the old existence of
confidence, and Paul at least was shaken in allegiance. Nor was this
all, for he had begun to have some apprehension of his own character,
and to take soundings of those emotional shallows which had always
seemed to him so profound. When a man has once learned to distrust his
own raptures they do not rise easily.

He took up his quarters with Darco, and they worked all day together,
and, on occasion, far into the night, for they were entered on a race
against time, and an extended run of the piece which then held the stage
at Darco's theatre meant loss. Act by act was put in rehearsal as
it left the writers'