“So that’s why I missed you in San Francisco four years ago!” Brainard exclaimed. “Because you wanted to write a play!”

He threw back his head and laughed as if the idea was peculiarly ironical.

“Yes!” the ex-reporter Farson replied, with an echo of Brainard’s irony. “You see I had always meant to be a playwright and took to reporting to make a living. When you came along and gave me that five hundred for helping you crack the safe and get away with the contents, I chucked the newspaper job and moved on to Broadway—been here ever since.”

“Well, how has it gone?”

Farson’s face wrinkled comically.

“I haven’t quite persuaded Broadway that I am another Sardou. In fact the only creation of mine that ever saw the footlights is a melodrama, founded on our adventures that evening in Frisco. And I sold that for fifty dollars to a western syndicate. I have never heard from it since. I need hardly say it does not satisfy my aspirations.”“So you went back to reporting?”

“Of a kind,” the young man replied with a sudden attempt to become important. “I am on the staff of Bunker’s Magazine.”

“And they sent you here to interview me!” Brainard laughed again.

“Bunker’s thought that the public would be interested in your rapid rise into the limelight, and as I had some experience in the great West they sent me to extract from you the crude ore of a personal document article,” Farson explained with engaging impudence, glancing appreciatively at his subject.

The interview happened to take place in the parlor of a suite in the same large hotel on Fifth Avenue from which almost exactly four years before Brainard had slunk away with the manuscript of his rejected play in his pocket, and had thence wended his way disconsolately homeward to meet the fate that whirled him on during four years of exciting adventure. Numerous trunks and other impedimenta cluttered the room, indicating that the miner, who in the words of Farson “had succeeded in climbing into the limelight” had but just arrived from Arizona and did not yet know that he needed a man servant.

Through the open windows came the roar of the traffic on the avenue, so long unfamiliar to the miner’s ears. He rose from the table, where over a bottle of wine he had been telling the magazine man something about the wonderful Melody mine, and gazed out of the window into the seething stream of humanity below. This unexpected meeting with the reporter of the Despatch who had helped him in his first exploit with Krutzmacht’s fortune had brought to his memory sharply the great contrast between his last appearance in New York and the present.

His face, now adorned by a mustache and a short brown beard, which the hotel barber had not yet had an opportunity to trim to an artistic point, was reddened and roughened by exposure to the fierce Arizona sun. His hands were large and coarse, as if they had handled every instrument but the pen. His whole person had filled out solidly, and he walked with the awkward gait of one accustomed to the saddle rather than the motor car. But what occupied his mind at this moment was the curious consciousness of that other self, so vastly different, so inconceivably discouraged and weak, whom he could see down below on the pavement, dragging his thin body through the April mist. Whole worlds separated the two! . . .

The magazine man disturbed his revery by a question.“You went out there after copper in the first place, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Brainard said, turning with a twinkle in his eyes, “I went after copper and got sulfur instead! That often happens in life.”

“You went out there as a rank greenhorn,” Farson translated, “and come back as the chief representative on this earth of his satanic majesty,—the Sulfur King.”

“The Sulfur King!” Brainard repeated with an appreciative chuckle. “That’s good. Are you going to write me up for Bunker’s as the Sulfur King?”

“You had rather have me do that than play you up as a successful safe-breaker?”

Farson looked at the miner with admiration mixed with a little envy, perhaps, as one to whom splendid chances of living had come. From the professional point of view Brainard would make excellent material for eulogy as type of “the man who does things,” so ardently beloved by magazine editors.

“Do whatever you like with me,” Brainard remarked slowly. “You couldn’t make it too wonderful,—nor explain it all. . . . Do you know that four years ago, just at nightfall like this, I stood out there in the crowd, wondering how I could best spend my last quarter for a meal? I never dreamed I should be looking down from this window some day!”

He chuckled quietly to himself over the picture. The magazine man pricked his ears for “the human interest note,” divining a life story, and hinted broadly:

“What really put you into mining, after you left Frisco?”

“How did I get to Arizona? Oh, that’s a long story. I went by way of Mexico and Paris and New York. Help yourself to another cigar.”

After a few moments he added in a less joking tone,—“I went out there in search of an heir to Krutzmacht’s property. I didn’t find her—instead I found the Melody mine!”

“I’d like to hear that story,” Farson said quickly, with the keen scent of the old newspaper man.

Brainard shook his head.

“Not to-day—perhaps sometime. . . . But not for publication—that! I’ve given you one good newspaper scoop four years ago, and this thing for your magazine. But the other I’ll keep for myself.”

Farson’s face expressed a momentary disappointment. But he merely remarked:

“I’ve often wondered about you ever since I helped you aboard the ferry with that big bag. Got it still?”

“Yes, what’s left of it.” . . .

Frank as Brainard had become under the influences of his new life and much as he was attracted by the careless, good-humored young newspaper man, he could not bring himself to tell him the intimate details of his story, which in his feelings was so much more concerned with his unknown mistress than with himself. Ever since that evening when he had stood in the abandoned house above the Arizona desert, surrounded by the mute evidences of the girl’s existence, he had prosecuted vigorously the search for the elusive Melody, using every means known to him—and all in vain. There had been no clew whatever that led beyond the railroad tracks. Neither in San Francisco, where he had looked first, nor in New Orleans, where he had gone in the hope of finding some trace of the girl’s mother, nor in New York, where the old German was well known, could he learn anything definite of Krutzmacht’s family affairs. There were many who had known the business man, but as sometimes happens the business man had admitted no one into his personal confidence.

After the first few months of this search, when forced finally to fall back upon the usual devices of advertising and employing detectives, Brainard returned to Monument,—the spot where he had found and lost his one substantial proof of the girl’s reality,—and there he had taken up the project he had conceived of working the abandoned mine until some heir should be found. Into this project he had thrown himself with all the ardor of his newly awakened temperament and found in the struggles that ensued a relief from the aimless hunting for the lost girl. As time passed with no results from all the agencies he had used in his search, his mind became less occupied with the vision of his unknown mistress, and his life concentrated itself upon this accidental undertaking,—all the more as it proved unexpectedly difficult and failure frequently threatened. His pride and good faith as well as his new manhood were challenged in the struggle, which had only quite recently resulted in abounding triumph. Now that he was free to look about him again and direct his energy into a new channel, the thought of Melody returned to haunt his mind. One of his purposes in coming to New York was to start afresh the hopeless search. An idea came to him as he talked with Farson about the mine. Perhaps publicity of his success with the Melody mine in Arizona might attract the attention of the one most concerned. With this thought in mind he said to the magazine man, turning away from the window:

“I’ll tell you all you want to know about the mine—you can put it in your story.”

He gave him a lively account of the vicissitudes of the great Melody mine at Monument, Arizona, and his experiences with it.

“So,” Farson summed up at the end, “the copper gave out?”

Brainard laughed.

“I should say not! There are millions of tons of copper in those hills.”

“Then what was the trouble?”

“It cost too much to mine and smelt it at present prices. After pouring a good bit of money into the thing, I found that out. The sulfur looked promising, and we went in for that; but that, too, came near taking our last dollar before it made good.”

He told the magazine man how he had discovered traces of sulfur in an old crater among the hills, had made tests, and had found that the mineral existed in great quantities and almost pure. But when they went after it, new difficulties were encountered—quicksands. One method after another was tried and found useless, until the experts he had summoned were ready to give up the job. Then, almost in despair, Brainard had experimented with a novel method of extracting the sulfur by pumping steam through one pipe into the earth and taking the solution out by another. It was successful.

“It’s a steady yellow stream out of the bowels of the earth—a stream of gold!”

The young man sighed with envy.

“Better than gold,” Brainard continued. “A thousand per cent better! I wouldn’t dare tell you how much money that yellow stream pours into my pockets every twenty-four hours.”

Farson’s eyes gleamed, and he looked covetously at the bulging pockets of the miner’s loose coat.

“So you made good,” he said; “and of course you came up here to New York, straight off, to spend your money.”

“That’s it,” Brainard assented with a laugh.

“It’s a good place to enjoy oneself. What are you going to do?”

Brainard looked quizzically at the ex-reporter. “Get some clothes, first. I need ’em, don’t you think?”

Farson candidly admitted that he did.

“But,” he added, “you don’t seem the sort to blow your money the usual way—chorus-girls, or country places, or yachts, or stock market, or—”

Brainard shook his head vigorously at each item of gratification mentioned.“What are you going to do with that yellow stream?”

“I have my idea,” Brainard admitted.

“That’s what I want to know.”

“I’ll tell you, and you can make another article about it, if you like.”

The young man leaned forward, all eager attention. Brainard smoked thoughtfully, then began.

“You’ve written plays—got one in your pocket this minute, probably.”

“You don’t mean you are going to write plays!” Farson said disgustedly.

“No, my boy—not now. I tried it once. But I hope to make it possible for you and other young men to write their plays and get them put on the stage. I’m going to build theaters, here and in other cities. I shall found a national society of dramatic art. That’s the way I’m going to blow in the money from the sulfur stream as long as it flows!”

“Whew!” The magazine man whistled dubiously. “Another uplift movement for the poor drama?”

“Let me explain,” Brainard continued.

With much more eagerness than he had shown over his exploits with copper and sulfur, he sketched the story of his great idea, which had first taken possession of him that last night of his week’s stay in Paris, while he wandered through the silent streets. He told of the vision that had come to him in the snowy heights of the Arizona mountains, in the silence of earth and sky—a vision of beautiful art that might be created into reality by the aid of the wealth which he could give it. He had set himself earnestly to the task of getting the necessary gold out of the ground, and all through these years, in the vigils of his lonely nights in the mining camp, he had nursed his vision.

He poured out his heart freely to Farson, because he was young and a would-be dramatist, and could understand; and Farson, listening to the story of this idea, became warmed with the enthusiasm of the other and forgot his habitual journalistic skepticism.

“It’s big!” he murmured.

“And now it will no longer be just an idea. It’s to become fact! I have the money—at least, it’s mine for the present.” Brainard corrected himself. “One can do something with half a million or so a year.”

“Half a million a year!” the young man gasped.

“More or less—at present rather more, I should say,” Brainard admitted carelessly. “Depends on the market for crude sulfur, you understand. It’s pretty strong just now. And there’s the copper to fall back upon, when the price of copper goes up. There’s no need to worry about the money.”

Just here they were interrupted by a boy with a card.

“Show the gentleman up!” Brainard exclaimed, glancing a second time at the card.

The magazine man rose reluctantly to go, saying:

“Another time, if you would be good enough to tell me more about your plans—”

“Don’t go!” Brainard interrupted warmly. “If you are interested, stay, and you will hear more about my great idea. This gentleman has come from Chicago by appointment to talk it over.”

“Thanks!”

“Why don’t you drop that magazine job?” Brainard suggested abruptly. “I shall need a secretary. I think you would be the right sort. Why not begin now?”

“Done!” the journalist exclaimed boyishly, and they shook hands. This was a millionaire after his own heart, who did things casually at the drop of the hat with the most surprising ease.

“You’ll have a better chance to write your plays,” Brainard remarked genially.It pleased him to think that here, on the spot where he had experienced his last defeat, he was able to play the part of good fortune to youth.

“Somehow,” said Farson enthusiastically, “I feel it’s going to be like a play all the time with you!”

“The chap that’s coming up to see me,” explained Brainard, “is an actor and a manager in a small way. He calls himself Ferris MacNaughton—an odd genius, a Scotsman who has played all over the world. I ran across him in a small Arizona town, doing Shakespeare to the mining camps, and doing it well, too. He seemed interested in the idea, and so, when I got ready to pull out, I wired him to meet me here. He hasn’t lost any time,” he added as the door swung open.

II

It was a curious figure that entered the room. The Scotsman was short, thick-set, about fifty years old, with a round, bald head fringed with white hair. He was dressed with an evident attempt at youthful smartness, and dangled a small cane. Between his thick lips was the end of a black cigar. His large face, portentous brows, and mild blue eyes looked as if he had started as Falstaff and ended as a Scottish Hamlet.

MacNaughton bowed profoundly, and said in deep, measured tones, that were reminiscent of blank verse:

“Good afternoon, gentlemen! I received your telegram yesterday, Mr. Brainard. It found me at an unoccupied moment in my career, and I am happy to place myself at your disposal.”

Farson grinned. He judged from his acquaintance with Broadway that the unoccupied moments in the Scotsman’s career had been frequent of late years, and that he had spent a good many of them in the outer offices of theatrical managers. He wondered how his new employer, who seemed wide awake enough to capture one fortune and make a second, had come to mix himself up with this seedy actor.

“Good!” Brainard exclaimed genially, shaking MacNaughton’s hand. “This is my secretary, Edward Farson—Ferris MacNaughton. Let us get to work at once and see how we can spend the better part of half a million a year on the theater!”

At the casual mention of this large sum of money, the old actor did a bit of unpremeditated acting, displaying astonishment so genuine that it set the secretary laughing. He recovered himself, and remarked in his Shakespearian tones:

“One might do a good deal on even less!”

The three sat down about the table, and lighted fresh cigars. Brainard presently drew a small, much worn note book from an inner pocket, and began turning its leaves, reading thoughtfully from time to time:

“Item first—create an organization that will build and support theaters in the chief cities of the United States—to be called in every instance ‘The People’s Theater.’

“Good!” the actor assented loudly. “I have always maintained that the drama came originally from the ranks of the common people, and should be the chief means of their education.”

The magazine man made a wry face. The “People” according to Broadway were visitors from out of town who would pay two fifty apiece for the “show”—any show. Brainard read on:

“Item second—no boxes and no reserved seats in the People’s Theaters. Highest price of seats, one dollar, and free matinees on Saturdays.”

“You will need a million!” Farson murmured.

“I used to find it so hard to get a good seat when I wanted to go to the theater,” Brainard explained. “Even when I had scooped together the price, for some extraordinary occasion, I couldn’t get nearer than the twelfth row. Every theater was always sold up to that row, no matter how early in the day I got to the box office. I have an invention in mind that will register every seat sold or given out, and show it on a diagram, to put an end to the usual practice. But let us get to more important matters!”

He read out different items:

“Exchange of the different companies in the organization—a college of dramatic art—cafÉs in the theaters—libraries of dramatic literature—open-air theaters in the suburbs and city parks, etc.”

“But,” the actor inquired sententiously, “what do you propose to give the people in your theaters?”

“Plays, of course!” Brainard replied. “All sorts of plays that are worth while, old and new!”

“Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Hauptmann,” the actor remarked voluptuously. “Sophocles, MoliÈre—”

“Hold on!” Farson put in. “Where will you get the people to sit through that?”

“My dear young sir,” the actor retorted paternally, “the people love the best. I have played the classics in every State in the Union to enthusiastic audiences,—sometimes small.”

“You bet!” Farson murmured.

“But always enthusiastic!”

“We must have modern plays, too,” Brainard added.

“But all the modern plays are copyrighted, and the dramatists are under contract to Einstein & Flukeheimer, and their brethren.”

“Then we’ll make our own playwrights,” Brainard replied placidly. “Here’s one!” He tapped the younger man fraternally on the knee.

The secretary subsided.

“And the companies?” the Scotsman inquired. “They make the piece!”

“The very best actors, of course,” Brainard agreed enthusiastically. “We’ll pay the highest salaries and give long contracts and pensions—that’s all in the scheme. You will help us to organize the parent company, Mac. I’ll give you a free hand.”

The old actor closed his eyes in a happy dream. He saw himself at last as a metropolitan impresario, dealing magnificently with the “talent.”

Brainard read on, but before he had finished the note book—which contained a remarkable mixture of detail and aspiration—dinner came up. They talked as they ate, and they talked afterward as they sipped their coffee and smoked. They became heady with enthusiasm, for Brainard’s imperturbable optimism and faith in his idea were like drafts of Arizona air, intoxicating to those who lived in lower altitudes.

The actor, mellowed by good food and good wine,—and more by the confidence this new Croesus seemed to have in him,—discoursed almost tearfully of aspirations and ambitions suppressed through long years that were now within the possibility of realization. He had always wished to devote his life to Ibsen and the great classics, he declared, but the box office had prevented the fulfillment of his artistic ideals.

“I’m the box office now,” Brainard laughed, “and I am here to fulfill ideals!” He picked up the note book again. “I had forgotten the college of actors, for both sexes, which we must run in connection with the enterprise. It will give free tuition, of course, and there will be scholarships for promising pupils. You will have to look after that, too, Mac.”

“Haven’t I been training lads and lassies who couldn’t speak the language all my life?” the old Scotsman burred.

“We should recruit our road companies from the college,” Brainard suggested.

“It will take a good deal of time to do all that,” Farson remarked.

“We’ve all the time in the world,” Brainard retorted confidently. “Make a note of that, Mr. Secretary!”

So they talked on as men will talk, when it is still a matter of words and not actions. Late in the evening, or rather early in the morning, Brainard developed his plan for an outdoor theater in some beautiful mountain spot, or on an island along the seacoast. It was a bit of fairy fancy which he called the “Summer Festival.” Every summer, for a few weeks in August, in some sylvan spot of great natural beauty, with a background of lofty trees and cliffs, there would be held a dramatic festival, where lovers of the art could resort to live for a time in the atmosphere of Sophocles, Calderon, MoliÈre, Goethe, Shakespeare.

“A kind of theatrical camp meeting,” the secretary jokingly named it.“Exactly. Imagine an open-air theater built upon a cliff, with the blue sea below, backed by thick trees and a wild forest park, where the audience might stroll between the acts and after the performance. Think what could be made of such a place!”

It was the final flash of Brainard’s vision, and they sat for some time in silent contemplation of what was before them. At last the old actor spoke in a husky voice:

“My boy, it is sublime! It has come almost too late for me. I cannot walk your great stage and triumph in your triumph. My days are nearly over, spent in miserable efforts to exist and not debase my noble art. But I can help, and I pledge to you and to the People’s Theater all the strength that is left in me.”

The old Scotsman’s eyes were moist with tears. Here was another whom the great idea had touched and lifted to unexpected heights, Brainard thought happily.

“You’ll have your chance to act, too,” Brainard remarked consolingly.

“What do you mean to do first?” the secretary demanded impatiently.

“Incorporate, and find an architect,” Brainard replied concisely.

“Another trust!”“A beneficent trust.”

“What we need is publicity,” the young magazine man announced. “I’ll look out for that!”

“What we all need now,” laughed Brainard, “is sleep. We’ve done enough for one day.” For the early morning procession of drays had begun to thunder over the pavements beneath the window. “And to-day I must engage a tailor and consult with my banker.”

“Before we go,” Farson said, “let us drink to Aladdin and his sulfur lamp! Here’s to Aladdin, the Sulfur King!”

They drank the toast, and another proposed by the actor:

“The American Drama!”

And a third which was scarcely intelligible to Farson, although the old actor considered it quite suitable:

“To Melody!”

Then they separated. In this gay and careless fashion the plot was laid for pouring half a million a year into the Sulfur King’s great Idea.

III

The new secretary had some difficulty in convincing Brainard of the importance of what he called “publicity.” His own varied experience as a newspaper and magazine writer had given him a deep faith in this modern method of propaganda. He constituted himself at once the publicity agent of the new undertaking.

“It’s the only way to do things in this country. You must scatter your idea about in the newspapers and magazines, get people to talk about it and read about it, or it is dead before you start.”

Rather against Brainard’s inclination, Farson set off the first of a series of journalistic squibs concerning the “Sulfur King,” his spectacular fortune, and the novel manner in which he purposed to spend it, in a profusely illustrated article in the new Bunker’s Magazine. Brainard submitted to this indignity because of his desire to advertise the Melody mine and in this way possibly attract the attention of its unknown mistress. But of all the letters that came to him after the publication of his spectacular biography, not one was from “Melody.”

The People’s National Drama Society had not been incorporated before the sputter in the daily press began, with long-winded remarks by theatrical experts—actors, managers, and critics—predicting failure and ridiculing “the new uplifter of the stage from Arizona.” The public yawned and skipped. There was nothing new in this “uplift” talk about the drama; but the “Sulfur King” was new, and the public was much more interested in him and his golden stream of wealth than in his dream of creating a popular drama.

All sorts of mythical tales began to appear in print concerning his personality. The story that obtained the widest vogue was that Brainard, having in his younger and penniless days sighed in vain for the favor of a theatrical lady, had gone off to Arizona with despair in his heart, “struck sulfur,” and now had returned to build a palatial theater on Broadway for his old flame. A rather obscure young actress was named as the heroine of the tale, and the lady, when asked about the story by reporters, failed to deny it. Instead, she coyly led the newspaper men to embroider further details on the theme.

“See what you’ve got me into with your publicity business!” Brainard exclaimed ruefully, holding out the morning newspaper to Farson, when the latter came for the day’s work to the little house on Gramercy Park into which Brainard had moved.

The secretary, who had already seen the article, merely grinned and admitted:

“She has the cheek! They are all like that—anything to get themselves talked about. But it’s all right—it helps to spread the great idea.”

“I should say it did! Look at that!” Brainard pointed to a sack of mail that had been poured out over the library table. “And there’s a lot more, they tell me, at the post office. We shall have to open an office and hire some clerks, or chuck it into the fire.”

“It all helps,” the ex-reporter affirmed, dipping his hands into the mass with zest. “You don’t understand the American public yet. It has to have Romance with a capital R to sugar-coat any idea before it will swallow it.”

“There was pretty nearly everything in yesterday’s mail, from an offer of marriage to a recipe for making a successful play, not to mention one hundred and eighty-seven specimens of original American drama.”

“Here are a few more of the same sort,” the secretary laughed, tossing out a handful of bulky packages. “The literary committee will have something to do when it finds time. That’s me!”

He tossed the manuscripts into a corner.

“The thirty-first application for position as leading lady from an actress ‘of established reputation, at present on the Oregon circuit’—that goes to Mac’s pile,” he remarked, throwing the lady’s letter into a basket. “Proposal of marriage, marked ‘strictly personal,’” he continued, handing over an envelope to his employer. “We must get out some printed forms for acknowledgment of these—one for marriage, one for plays, and one for positions in the company.”

“If this is publicity, let’s try for privacy!” Brainard groaned, tearing the marriage letter into bits.

“Here’s a new note!” Farson exclaimed, pausing in his swift disposal of the mail to read aloud a letter.

“Gents:

“I saw in yesterday’s Kansas City papers a piece about your new theater. I think your idea is fine! It’s all right! Have you got a part for a beginner who will take anything or everything, but wants to begin? I know I’ve got stuff in me, and I must see New York. Please reply.

“Yours anxiously,

“Louisiana Delacourt,
“P. O. Box 8, Iole, Kansas.”

“I think that Louisiana should get a chance to see New York,” Brainard observed.

“She might take less than everything then. What do you say?”

“Put her down for the college,” laughed Brainard. “She thinks the Idea is fine.”

And that is how Miss Louisiana Delacourt, of Iole, Kansas, became the first pupil in the new college of dramatic art, which was not yet founded.

When the second mail came in with a large assortment of begging letters and more manuscript plays, Brainard rose in disgust and seized his hat to flee from his own house.

“Don’t forget Mrs. Pearmain’s—luncheon at half past one!” the secretary warned.

“Confound Mrs. Pearmain!” Brainard muttered. “Just tell her I’ve gone out of town, Ned.”

A look of horror spread over the secretary’s handsome face.

“It wouldn’t do! She’s to have a lot of important people there to hear about the Idea. She would never forgive you. It would spoil everything at the social end,” the young man pleaded. He had worked for weeks to “start the social business,” as he called it, and thus arouse an interest of a fashionable kind in their undertaking. This luncheon at Mrs. Pearmain’s was to be the brilliant opening of a social campaign that should go hand in hand with the more democratic press campaign. It was unthinkable for Brainard to refuse from whim or shyness or fastidiousness the gracious advances of Society!

“I don’t like all this woman business,” Brainard remarked sulkily, laying aside his hat. “Whatever did you get us into it for, Ned? I don’t need their money.”

“No, you don’t need their money,” Farson pronounced oracularly, “and that’s just why you’ll get what you do need. You need their influence. You can’t get anything started without the women—not in America. A movement for art in any form couldn’t exist, if the women didn’t take it up. Why, there isn’t any Art in any form in this country, except what the women keep going. So far as literature, drama, and music go, there’s but one sex in America, and it doesn’t wear trousers either!”

“Lord!” the young MÆcenus groaned, “I didn’t know that, Ned.”

“There’s a good deal you don’t know about America and Americans that you’ll have to learn, if you want to make good in this thing,” the secretary commented severely. “That’s what you need me for—to open your eyes.”

“Thanks,” Brainard murmured humbly.“You will find Mrs. Donnie Pearmain the very one to give the right cachet to the movement.”

The young man rather prided himself on his social knowingness acquired since his return to New York. Brainard sighed, and, with a grimace, resigned himself to Mrs. Donnie Pearmain. The secretary proceeded to prepare his master for the coming luncheon.

“You know what she did for the half orphans last year? The year before it was the tuberculosis campaign. But now she’s giving up mere charity for art, and ours is the very thing to interest her. The Rev. Thomson Spicer will be there.”

“The clergy, too!”

“Of course. They make the next best publicity agents after the newspapers. They preach about popular movements, you know. You’ll see what Spicer will do for us next Sunday. He’s much interested in the moral influence of the theater upon the masses.”

Brainard groaned.

“President Nathaniel Butterfield of Eureka University has also promised to be there.”

“Professors? Ye gods! Where will you stop, Ned?”

“Dr. Butterfield has views on the educational value of the stage.”

“I’m not founding a religious kindergarten!”The secretary, ignoring this feeble protest, consulted his note book for further details.

“Jaggard, the banker, has been asked, and Toowit, of the Daily Beacon, and my old boss, Howard Bunker. A very representative gathering of prominent persons!” the secretary commented complacently. “They would make an admirable board of trustees.”

“What do you propose to trustee—me?” Brainard roared.

“Every movement has to have a board of trustees—a list of good names to print at the head of the note paper, you know,” the young man explained patiently. Brainard’s simplicity was occasionally wearisome, and he was proving more difficult to handle than Farson had expected. It required considerable tact at times “to keep the ‘Sulfur King’ all on the track.” He remarked to pacify his employer, “They don’t interfere unless you ask them for money, and of course you won’t have to do so in this case.”

What Brainard might have said about wrapping his great idea in a wad of distinguished trustees was prevented by the appearance of MacNaughton. He came into the library at that moment, with the air of an old diplomat, which was the rÔle he had affected since he had joined the movement. His quiet gray suit was adorned with a small red button. He wore horn-bowed eyeglasses and carried a large leather portfolio. An unlighted cigar protruded from his mouth.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” he remarked, settling himself in a chair opposite the secretary and turning over the pile of applications for positions in the companies of the new society. He slowly dropped the letters to the floor. “All rotters, every one of them,” he announced with a profound sigh. “My boy, will you please hang out the sign, ‘No lady help wanted’?”

“Are you sure they are all so bad?” Brainard asked hopefully.

“My dear fellow,” the old Scotsman replied languidly, “there are at least three thousand women in New York to-day, young and old, who think they can act and want a chance to take your money. I’ve seen twenty-nine hundred and ninety-nine of them!”

“There must be some good ones eager for the opportunity we offer.”

“All those that are any good, and many that aren’t, have signed up with Einstein & Flukeheimer and the other managers. I tell you they have passed the word up and down Broadway to have nothing to do with us. They call us cranks!” the old actor cried. “We are blacklisted, sir—that’s what it is.”“But with this great chance to do something for dramatic art?” Brainard protested, quoting from a conversation he had had with a famous actress.

“Talk!”

“The opportunity to devote themselves to their profession, relieved of all sordid cares?”

“More talk!”

“Their desire to subordinate personal ambitions for the good of dramatic art?”

“All talk!”

“We’ll have to double the salaries, then.”

“Even that won’t bring the better ones who have made names already. They don’t want to compromise themselves with highbrows. We shall have to start with unknown talent and build up our company gradually.”

“That will take time, but I like it better,” Brainard replied optimistically. “Show him Louisiana’s letter, Ned. That’s the right spirit.”

“The little dear,” MacNaughton commented ironically. “How many like her there are!” He dropped the letter in the secretary’s basket.

Presently there appeared the architect who had been asked to prepare plans for the first playhouse. The three gathered around him and examined the voluminous prints and watercolor sketches that he had brought with him. He was a young man, and he had seen his opportunity, with the wealth of the sulfur king behind him He had planned a monumental building of marble, with beautiful colonnades, a magnificent foyer, reception rooms, a restaurant, and a library. Behind, in the form of an annex, was the college of dramatic art with its own little theater, lecture rooms, and dormitory. The whole looked like a public institution for the insane rather than a simple theater.

“What do you think it would cost to build?” Brainard inquired, as they came to the last sheet.

“I should think it could be done for three millions,” the architect replied glibly.

“Three millions,” the secretary repeated easily.

“Three millions—um!” MacNaughton echoed, as one who dealt habitually in seven figures.

Brainard said nothing. He was thinking, perhaps, that the Melody sulfur spring must gush like a yellow geyser to pour forth enough gold for the Idea as it was expanding from day to day. He had learned, however, not to be daunted by large figures—the mine had taught him that—nor did he ever allow himself to worry over expense. He had wasted his youth in such fruitless cares. As a man he would do what he could, and then stop.

Presently the three left for Mrs. Pearmain’s luncheon. The secretary thoughtfully took with him the plans for the new theater.

IV

Mrs. Donnie Pearmain, as everybody knows, is the only daughter of old Joseph P. Barton, the founder of the milk trust, and derived her very ample personal fortune from that famous financier’s successful manipulation of the milk market. Starting as a plain New Jersey farmer, who peddled his own milk, Barton organized the great trust, and when he died was its largest individual stockholder. It was he, too, who first generally introduced the use of the small glass bottle instead of the large tin can in the distribution of milk, thereby enabling the trust to add at least thirty per cent to the retail price of its product.

In spite of these accomplishments, financial and hygienic, Barton was one of the most widely misunderstood and execrated of the older generation of millionaires, doubtless because of the abnormal increase in cost of this necessary article of domestic consumption, and its deterioration in quality, since the formation of the milk trust. Consequently, although Barton’s daughter had married into glue—one of the Pearmain sons—which is, of course, an eminently quiet and respectable fortune that has escaped the keen eyes of the muckrakers, she had never been able wholly to live down the taint of milk. Too many even of the social leaders of the city remembered the small bottles of Barton’s pale-blue fluid, retailed as milk at nine cents a quart, to forgive the social ambitions of Mrs. Donnie Pearmain, in spite of her respectable veneer of glue.

The energetic little lady, however, had learned from her rich father his great life axiom—if you can’t do what you want in one way, you can in another. So she attacked the citadels of social leadership by the way first of Philanthropy and now of Art, as the magazine man had accurately related to Brainard. Thanks to her energy as patroness in these allied fields, she was in a fair way of living down at last the odor of milk and attaining the coveted reward of social leadership.

Mrs. Pearmain had received Edgar Brainard most graciously in the previous interviews that had been arranged between them by the young secretary, and had shown a most intelligent interest in his scheme of creating a People’s Theater. The young sulfur king appealed to her all the more because he expected no financial assistance in developing his hobby. She would not be called upon to pour any milk into this philanthropy.

She did not in the least doubt that Brainard’s controlling purpose was the same as hers—to become properly known in society by identifying himself with a popular cause, and she commended his sagacity in taking this means of living down sulfur. Therefore she had easily been brought to lend her influence to the Idea. At Farson’s suggestion, she had gathered together, in her great house on the upper avenue, a most distinguished luncheon party, which, as the secretary had shrewdly said, would give Éclat to any letterhead.

When Brainard arrived, with his companions, he was shown into the picture gallery, where Mrs. Pearmain was chatting with her guests. He was immediately presented to each one. They examined him with curiosity, for even in New York a young man with an annual income of more than half a million, which he desires to spend upon the public, is not a common phenomenon.

The university president, who looked like a banker, was especially affable, and stuck closely to Brainard’s side. Dr. Butterfield sincerely regretted that he had not had the good luck to capture this young Croesus before he had committed himself to this freakish idea about the drama, and hoped that there was still some stray million which he might divert into the channels of the higher education at Eureka. It was for this purpose that he had torn himself away at midday from his many duties at the university. The other guests, understanding the game, looked on with sympathetic smiles.

Brainard had spent two dreary years at Eureka where he had found little to relieve the ignominy of his dire poverty, and thus he knew something about “old Nat,” as the head of that institution was familiarly known among the undergraduates. When in the course of their conversation Brainard admitted that he had been enrolled at the university, Butterfield beamed upon him with a new warmth and remarked eagerly:

“How interesting! I didn’t know that you were a Eureka man.”

“I didn’t graduate,” Brainard confessed.

“Ah, that’s too bad! I presume you left college for the more arduous education of a business career?” the college president suggested.

“I left it to earn a living,” Brainard replied simply.

“Exactly,” the president said with a deprecatory cough. “That’s what I meant.”

He made a mental note of the fact that Brainard had been a student at Eureka. The university should be able to use that happy fact; the trustees might consider it proper to bestow an honorary degree upon this distinguished half son, who had somehow managed to achieve fame and wealth after deserting the maternal halls. And immediately he began to compose in imagination a few of those celebrated periods with which he was accustomed to bestow academic honors upon similar practical “sons of Eureka.”

“Can’t you find time to come out to us some day?” he inquired deferentially. “I’m sure the boys will be delighted to welcome you back to your old home. A little address at chapel? It is a great inspiration for young men thus to come into touch with persons who have made their mark in life.”

Brainard merely laughed. He remembered a number of occasions when “old Nat” had introduced distinguished visitors to the academic audience in somewhat similar words. . . .

At the luncheon Brainard was seated between the college president and his hostess. He easily recovered from his natural shyness and talked fluently of Arizona and sulfur. The others listened deferentially to him, and in the many subtle ways that these people understood of testifying their consideration for a promising man he was made to feel welcome.

The banker, who had already put him on his list of capitalists that might be interested in some “undigested” railroad bonds his house had on their hands, was especially attentive. Indeed there was something of a contest for the guest’s attention between the banker and the university president, who each understood the other only too well. The banker, of course, did not commit the crudity of talking finance or even business; instead he discussed “public service” and “the new spirit of capital.” The kindly gleam of his shrewd blue eyes seemed to say to Brainard,—“You are one of the new kind, who will do everything for the dear Public!”

And so before the succession of excellent courses had gone far, Brainard had forgotten his distaste for the social side of life, which he had expressed so vigorously to Farson that morning, and really believed that all these good people were as eager as he was to give the American public a superior form of dramatic art at prices within the reach of the poorest. And when he began to talk to the company at the conclusion of the luncheon, after a few words of flattering introduction from the hostess, he had no trouble in finding what he wanted to say.

“First, you will forgive me if I say a word about myself, by way of introduction,” he began, with an engaging smile. “Four years ago, just about, I was here in New York, down and out—a poor, discouraged scribbler, earning a precarious existence by writing furniture advertisements, and sneaking into the upper gallery of a theater when I could get the price of an admission ticket.”

The magazine man, at the farther end of the table, writhed uncomfortably over this introduction. Why, he said to himself, go back—so far back? But the others seemed much interested, and as Brainard went on with his personal story, describing, in simple, straightforward language, life as he had lived it on the other side of the fence—its monotony and sordidness, its lack of interests that relieved from toil and worry—it was apparent that he had hit upon the best way to secure the attention of these people. There were some present, like Butterfield and Haggard, who had begun very near the beginning, and these liked to feel again the unmeasurable distance that separated them from their former state. Others, like Bunker and Mrs. Pearmain, thought the story so “picturesque” or “dramatic.” It served to increase their complacency at not “having been through all that, you know.” To Toowit of the Beacon and the few of a middling prosperity the tale of a rich man’s marvelous rise was exasperatingly titillating to the nerves.

Brainard touched briefly on the dramatic occurrence that had suddenly lifted him into action. His auditors looked as if they would like to hear more of this; but he paused after saying:

“I won’t go into that. It made another man of me—the man you see here now, that’s all!”

In a few moments he resumed, throwing back his head:

“My friends, I have had a vision!”

“Oh,” thought the secretary, “why doesn’t he come to the point? They don’t want to hear about his dreams!” But with that simple earnestness which was the most characteristic quality in his developed character, Brainard persisted in his effort to share his idealistic enthusiasm. He concluded his confession of faith with the words,—“It is not mere amusement, my friends, that I wish to further—it is life!”

Dr. Butterfield nodded his head approvingly at this point. He had said something not unlike this a few weeks before, when his college dedicated a new hall, the gift of a whisky millionaire. But the editor of the Daily Beacon looked thoroughly bored, and presently slipped away. All this idealistic talk was merely angel food for ladies and parsons, he seemed to think.

“I promised myself,” Brainard continued, “that if I were ever free to do so, I would give myself wholly to this Idea—give myself and all that I could command of resources to found a national theater worthy of our great people.”

Then, taking his little worn note-book from his pocket, Brainard ran rapidly over the details of his plan, most of which we have already learned. The magnitude of the scheme seemed to appeal at first to this fashionable audience; they were accustomed to deal in large figures, complex enterprises, and size stimulated their imaginations like alcohol. Oddly enough, it was only when he mentioned a small detail—the low, fixed scale of prices to be charged at the theaters—that the first dissenting voice made itself heard.

“You will pauperize the people!” the banker objected. That, he urged, was the trouble with so many humanitarian movements; they deprived the poor people of the joys of competition. The point passed, however, after a feeble discussion. That was a detail evidently to be settled later when the exigencies of deficits would doubtless force a more practical view upon this enthusiast. But a chorus of objections rose when Brainard said that the theaters were to have no reserved seats and no boxes.

“No boxes!” Mrs. Pearmain murmured, as if personally affronted. “But where shall we sit?”

“Where the others do,” Brainard replied promptly.Significant glances were exchanged about the table. Was this a socialist who had slipped in among them in disguise?

“Think what the opera would be without the boxes!” a large bejeweled woman whispered to her neighbor.

“These are to be the people’s theaters!” Brainard remarked somewhat sharply.

“Oh, I hadn’t understood!”

“Where will your theater be in New York?” some one asked.

“That is yet to be decided. I am looking into the matter to determine where the largest number of people can most easily reach a theater by the transportation system of the city. Somewhere on the lower West Side, I suspect.”

“Nobody will ever go down there!” several protested. “Everything is going up town all the time. . . . The Opera is too far away. . . .”

“Everybody can get there most cheaply and easily,” Brainard returned.

From this point interest waned visibly, and the company merely gave a polite half attention to the remaining notes, including the plan for a great summer festival of drama.

“It sounds like a Chautauqua,” Butterfield superciliously remarked. He detested these popular efforts for education, regarding them as “scabs” on the genuine industry.

“It would be exceedingly drafty, an open-air theater in the American climate,” said an old gentleman. “Think of a Bar Harbor fog!”

When these trivialities had passed, Brainard hastily read a few notes on the ideals of the enterprise—the careful staging of plays, the giving of classics, the revival of old plays, the need for purity of speech, something about poetic plays and the new drama.

As he read, there were signs of impatience. At the close came the hard, round voice of the Rev. Thomson Spicer:

“What sort of plays, may I inquire, Mr. Brainard, do you propose to give in your theaters?”

“All sorts,” Brainard replied, surprised.

“I trust there will be a strict moral censorship.”

“I agree with you, Dr. Spicer,” Mrs. Pearmain added in a severe tone. “The greatest care should be taken not to incite the people to discontent with their lot. Many of the plays given to-day are most dangerous in their tendency. They hold us up to ridicule, and even criticize our morals and our fortunes!”

It was here that Brainard committed his unpardonable blunder, and the secretary knew that he had finally “queered himself” with these influential people.

“I think,” he said sternly, “that the people should be the judge of what plays they want to see. You would not try to tell them what to eat or drink, would you, Mrs. Pearmain?”

There was an unfortunate allusion, perhaps, though unconscious, in the word “drink”; for that was precisely what Joseph Barton had done to the people—he had made them drink a very inferior grade of blue-white fluid called milk.

Brainard was rebuked by a stony silence, for his unintentional faux pas, and then there burst forth a flood of criticism. For an hour these good people tore to tatters the fabric of his dream. There seemed to be a perplexing double fire of objections. A few, the Reverend Spicer among them, felt that Brainard’s ideas about the sort of dramatic art suited to the people were dangerous and anarchistic. Unless such a scheme were carefully hedged in by a sound conservatism, it might work more harm than good. Others—and these were in the majority—asserted that it was altogether a mistake to found a people’s theater on the level of the people. Art was always aristocratic, they maintained, and the people should be invited guardedly to partake of the intellectual entertainment provided for them by their superiors in a playhouse situated where the best classes could patronize it, with obscure galleries to which the commonalty might penetrate.

“You must appeal to the intelligent classes,” the college president told Brainard dogmatically.

“Where are they?” he asked caustically.

Thereafter he sat silent, and did not answer any of the comments made.

At this point Farson circulated the plans for the new theater, in order to create a diversion, if possible, and explained to a little group the design of the grandiose edifice. Here the banker, who prided himself on his knowledge of architecture, took a hand and condemned the plans severely as “mixed in style,” “not indicative of the purpose of the building,” and so on.

The sheets passed up and down the drawing-room, to which the party had adjourned, and were ogled by fine ladies with lorgnettes, until Brainard rose, and, bowing to his hostess, prepared to leave.

“It’s so interesting, your plan, Mr. Brainard,” Mrs. Pearmain gushed; “but I think you must modify some of your ideas. You must start from above always, and work down.”

“Perhaps I shall, when I discover what is above,” he retorted.

The secretary gathered up the plans, and overtook Brainard in the hall. MacNaughton was already there. The old actor’s face was very red; he had not said a single word all the afternoon, and his self-control was making him positively apoplectic. He stalked majestically past the footman, metaphorically shaking the dust of the milk-trust millions from his feet as he crossed the threshold.

“Asses, fools, imbeciles!” he cried, as the three reached the pavement. “What do they know about the drama? About anything but food and drink? They want us to build a theater for them!”

“Rather a frost, wasn’t it, Ned?” Brainard observed, smiling humorously at the secretary.

Farson said nothing; he was too utterly depressed for words. The great social engagement on which he had counted so much had utterly missed fire, and he blamed himself for the fiasco. He should have written Brainard’s remarks for him and rehearsed him carefully beforehand, thus guarding against the “bad breaks” that his employer had been guilty of. And yet he had not expected to encounter such stiff prejudice, such conservatism as took offense at trivialities, and stuck fast on some nonessential detail. But his experience with the “patron” class of society had not been large.They walked back to Brainard’s little house, and all the way the old Scotsman delivered himself of invective against the leisure class. Brainard remarked once:

“This is a democracy, so called! Art is to be handed to the public on a gilt plate by the upper classes!”

He laughed sardonically.

When they entered the library, the fire was burning cheerily on the hearth. Brainard, taking the roll of plans from his secretary, glanced at the elaborate blueprints and water-color sketches of the palatial theater, which might be built for three millions. Slowly he poked the roll into the flames, and watched it burn until the last bit was licked up. His companions looked on in consternation.

“You are not going to give up?” Farson asked.

“Not much!”

“I’m so sorry for this afternoon,” the young man said apologetically. “How could one tell—”

“You couldn’t! I don’t regret it. They taught me a lot—a whole lot,” Brainard mused. “It was worth while for that. We shall learn all along the way, all of us.” After another silence he roused himself suddenly, and said, with characteristic optimism and good humor: “There’s been too much talk—let’s get to work! You, Mac, go ahead and engage the best company you can get together for love of art or of money. I will attend to building the theater. Farson can read those.” He pointed whimsically at the pile of plays in the corner. “We’ll let publicity take care of itself for a time.”

V

It was very nearly a year from the day of the disastrous luncheon at Mrs. Pearmain’s before the new theater was ready for rehearsal of the first play. The year, as Brainard had foreseen, had been replete with education, if nothing else. To find a suitable site for a popular playhouse, to erect thereon a pleasing building, commodious and attractive in design, and to engage a competent body of actors, would not seem a tremendous task. It had been done before; in fact, Messrs. Einstein & Flukeheimer, and their fellows, were doing it all the time. But the amateur with ideas and ideals was at a disadvantage.

Brainard had chosen the site, which was removed from the theater district but quite accessible—in fact, not far from the side street where he had once lodged. As the result of a large search he had discovered an architect who would devote himself to making a useful and suitable building instead of exploiting his patron’s purse, and together they had worked over the plans until a satisfactory theater of modest proportions was evolved. It was decided to postpone the starting of the Actors’ College until the general scheme had established itself. Almost all the other features of Brainard’s model playhouse for the people were included in the plans.

The site bought and the plans finished, Brainard thought that his difficulties in regard to the building were over, but in fact they had not yet begun. There was one strike after another upon the building from the excavation up, with an annoying regularity and persistence. They were usually ended by a compromise, which consisted in Brainard’s paying a contractor a slight increase in contract price, to “square” some union or labor leader. MacNaughton, whose imagination was much given to plots and dire machinations of the enemy, held that these labor troubles emanated from the offices of Einstein & Flukeheimer in upper Broadway. Farson and Brainard tried to convince him of the folly of this delusion, telling him that the noted managers probably had enough troubles of their own to keep them busy, and indeed would doubtless be glad to give the People’s Theater one of their own empty playhouses for a reasonable consideration if Brainard would take it off their hands. But they could not convince the Scotsman, who would go to Brainard’s house at all hours with mysterious information about the plot, which had to be confided in deep whispers. He had thought it all out in his own mind and believed that their hated rivals were working through the powerful agency of the Catholic Church. He said that was their favorite weapon when they wished to put any rival out of business or ruin a promising star, who had refused to listen to their offers.

When Brainard on his return from a hurried trip to Monument to inspect the mine found all work suspended upon the theater building, he was almost inclined to take Mac’s view of the plot against the People’s. This time it proved to be a dispute between two rival unions over the job of electric lighting. The contractor had given the work to the regular union, and the union of theatrical electricians had declared war. Every workman was called out. Brainard’s patience was exhausted, and he would not listen to the usual proposal for compromise suggested by a suave “business agent.” Instead he telegraphed his manager in Arizona to send up at once old Steve and the “emergency gang,”—the name by which a choice collection of spirits under the command of the old miner Steve operated either as miners or strike breakers. On the third day they arrived,—twenty lean and lank specimens from the plains, in sombreros and riding boots, prepared for immediate action. They did not know much about gas fitting, electric wiring, tile laying, and allied trades, but they took possession of the unfinished building with an unconcern that created a sensation in labor circles, and before long work had begun again and this time was pushed uninterruptedly towards a belated conclusion—all under the careful supervision of the “emergency gang,” who rolled cigarettes and spat upon the premises, while they discussed the drama with MacNaughton.

This prompt action by Brainard raised him highly in the esteem not only of the contractors and workmen, but of his associates in the venture. They saw that beneath his good nature and smiling placidity, he was a man to be reckoned with who meant to carry out his purposes. After this final flurry he took more pleasure in watching the work on the building, and thus realizing as far as the outside went his old dream. It would be, he flattered himself, the most delightful and convenient recreation center in the city,—not merely a garish, ugly auditorium where the largest number of unfortunates possible would be packed into the smallest area. . . . At last the building was sufficiently near completion to permit the beginning of rehearsals. . . .

On his way to the first general rehearsal Brainard stumbled over the marble workers, who were laying the mosaic floors with what seemed incredible deliberation. At this rate, push the work as he might, the theater would be a rough barn on the night of its opening to the public, which had been announced for the first of December. It was easier to capture a fortune and develop a great mine than to build a playhouse in America! That gave him something to think of.

He dropped his coat and hat in the pleasant library on the second floor, where the carpenters were languidly putting up bookcases. He had watched these same carpenters at their work for a number of weeks and had marveled at their grudging slowness of movement. Certainly they were not touched with enthusiasm for the great Idea, although the philanthropic object of the building had been carefully explained to them. Some of these carpenters lived in the neighborhood, and the theater was designed to give pleasure to them and their wives and their children—it was to be their playhouse. And yet they seemingly took no more interest in it than they would in the Octopus Building farther down town, on which they would be employed next. Brainard himself had put much more than money into every detail of the place; he had given it loving thought and care, and he wished a beautiful product which should reflect that spirit in every line and tone,—something intimate and lovely and human. But nothing of all this could he evoke in workman or contractor. It was all just “business,” to be skimped and shirked wherever possible. With a sigh from these reflections, thinking dubiously of the state of mind it betrayed in that “public,” on which he was counting so hopefully, he turned toward the stage. It gave him a thrill of real pleasure to push aside the heavy hangings and enter the mysterious darkness of the empty auditorium. At least this was real!

In the bare spaces of the undecorated stage, with a background of white brick wall, the new company was rehearsing Lear. It had been Brainard’s idea to open with what he considered to be the greatest play of the greatest English dramatist,—to be followed, he hoped, by a new American comedy. Thus the new company would pay their respects both to the past and to the future. Farson had tried to dissuade him from attempting Lear, saying lightly,—“You don’t want to queer us with the profession at the start.” But Brainard, whose first conscious interest in the drama had been aroused by a performance of Lear by the elder Salvini, which he had witnessed with his father in the hazy years of his youth, clung to his idea. Perhaps the part of Cordelia also touched his feeling for that lonely girl, whose memory in some way this undertaking was to commemorate. And MacNaughton came to his support in the discussion with Farson, assuring him of the popular triumphs he had scored throughout the West in this masterpiece.

It was not until the parts were to be assigned that Brainard discovered the reason for the old actor’s unshaken faith in the ability of the people to rise to Lear. He wished to play the title rÔle himself, and had broken into tears when forced to yield to a more suitable actor. It had been a very painful incident, and also an enlightening one, to the inexperienced patron of the theater. . . .

At the moment of Brainard’s arrival this morning, little Margaret Leroy, who, for the lack of a better actress, was their present leading lady, was languidly reciting Cordelia’s lines:

No blown ambition doth our arms incite,
But love, dear love, and our aged father’s rights,

In a few moments a voice with a beery tang boomed forth heavily into the dusky auditorium:

Aye, every inch a king;
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes!

At this point Brainard had his first misgivings. Perhaps, with their present company, Lear was overambitious. It gave him a pang to realize that the faded little Leroy, with her childish blond wig, was the best actress they could secure. She had had a quarrel with her manager at the opening of the season, because he wanted to send her to Omaha, in somebody else’s last season’s success, and had accepted the offer of the People’s Theater in a fit of pique, and with obvious reluctance.

“It queers one so with the profession,” she had told Farson confidentially.

She had insisted upon bringing along with her that ancient idol of the matinÉe, Dudley Warner. He was doing Lear in the style of Beau Brummel, in which he had made his last tour on the road.

As Brainard listened to the shrill pipings of Cordelia answered by Warner’s beery bass, his heart sank. He recalled all the rebuffs he had received from the better players whom he had approached—their insincere and voluble sympathy, their flimsy excuses, and the selfish fears that kept them from offending Einstein & Flukeheimer, in spite of the generous salaries and all the other temptations Brainard could think of to win them to the cause of art.

“Maybe your gold mine will give out, or you will get tired of the stage,” one well-known actress had said to him pertly. “Anyway, Einstein has promised to put me on in one of Dudu Smith’s plays, and that’s good enough for me!”

The People’s would have to do the best they could with second-rate and third-rate people until they had “made good,” or could train their own actors, Brainard reflected. Meanwhile Miss Leroy continued to pipe and Dudley Warner to bawl, interrupted now and then by MacNaughton’s resonant voice from the wings “No, no! That won’t do at all. Begin that once more, Miss Leroy,” etc.

“Ah, it’s rotten! Cut it out!” a voice murmured out of the darkness close to Brainard.

The fresh young voice so near to him startled Brainard, and he turned to see who had spoken. In the gloom he could make out a girl sitting hunched up, with crossed legs, a newspaper on her lap, from which she seemed to be eating her luncheon.

“It is pretty rotten,” Brainard admitted.

“The whole bunch is no account trash, anyway,” the young person continued impersonally, dangling a slice of sausage before her mouth. “Like last year’s grass or yesterday’s supper. But that Jenny! Why, she couldn’t decorate a cemetery properly!”

Thereupon, having disposed of the company, the young woman devoted herself unreservedly to her food, ignoring Brainard’s presence. The next time that the stage manager opened a discussion with Miss Leroy that promised to last for some moments, Brainard turned to the girl.

“Pardon my curiosity,” he said, taking the seat behind her, “but I should like to know how you happen to be here at the rehearsal.”

“Me? Why, I belong!” she replied, with a funny wrinkling of her small lips. “I’m part of it—this great uplift movement for the American drÁ-ma!”

Brainard winced at the gibe.

“Is that what they call us?”

“And a lot of other things,” the young woman admitted frankly. “Highbrows and amateurs and boneheads and—”

“I don’t know you, and I thought I had met every one in the company.”

“I’m not in the front row, you see. I am what they call a nee-o-phyte—a pupil in the Actors’ College, when there is any college.”

“Oh, I remember now!” Brainard said, recalling the first and only pupil enrolled. “Your name is—”

“Delacourt—Louisiana Delacourt,” the girl rolled out with gusto, as if she enjoyed her name, and hadn’t many opportunities of using it.

The slightly Southern accent of the girl set puzzling currents of memory at work in Brainard’s mind. He looked at her more closely, but in the dim light of the auditorium could not make out distinctly the face which was shrouded in one of the inverted “peach-basket” hats of the period. She seemed a slight little body.

“Say,” Miss Delacourt remarked confidentially, “I bet I could show that wiggle-tailed Flossie a stunt or two!”

“Do you know Lear?”

“Do I know Lear? I was nursed on Shakespeare. My mother knew the plays by heart, and used to recite ’em all over. Mr. Farson says he’ll get me a boy’s part in the last act. Five lines—but you’ll see how I’ll make ’em hum!”

Just then Farson came up to them out of the darkness of the auditorium, and nodded to the girl, who presently slipped off.

“So you know Miss Delacourt?” Brainard observed.

“Of course! Everybody about the place knows Louisiana. Queer little piece, isn’t she? Slangy and fresh, but she knows how to handle herself. . . . It’s pretty rotten!” he remarked cheerfully, glancing at the stage.

“Just what Louisiana said.”

“I guess she knows!”

Brainard and the secretary thereupon went out to lunch, and tried to forget their troubles.

VI

At last, amid turmoil and excitement, the opening day came. Brainard and Farson had been at the theater since early morning, doing what they could to bring order out of chaos. About lunch time MacNaughton rushed up to them, his face white with excitement.

“A telegram from Miss Leroy!” he gasped. “Doctor thinks she’s got appendicitis. She’s got Einsteinitis, all right,—that’s what is the matter with her! We can’t raise an actress in New York who knows Cordelia’s lines, let alone having rehearsed it. We’ll have to postpone the opening!”

“Not that!” Brainard said, with tightening lips. “Not if you read the lines, Mac!” The old actor stormed back and forth, snapping his fingers and cursing with equal warmth stars and managers, the stage and life.

“Isn’t there some one in the company who could take the part?” Brainard asked.

“Not one, man or woman!” the Scotsman growled. “We’re using the whole company.”

“Where’s Louisiana?” Farson inquired, a little smile wreathing his lips.“You mean that Kansas kid? She’s knocking about the stage somewhere,” MacNaughton replied. He had had several passages with Miss Delacourt already, and had no great opinion of her ability except in repartee. “You aren’t thinking of that child?”

“Let’s find her,” Farson said. “She knows Shakespeare by heart—her mother used to put her to sleep on it—she’s always getting it off when she isn’t ragging the show with her Kansas slang.”

They found Louisiana sitting on a pile of properties, playing with a lanky pup. She smiled on Farson in a friendly fashion, and ignored the manager.

“Say, what’s broken down now?” she drawled. “Have Miss Leroy’s stays given warning, or did the big bass fiddle bust a string?”

“Look here, Miss Louisiana,” Farson replied. “Quit your guying, and get ready for Cordelia. We’ll rehearse you all the afternoon.”

“Gee whiz!” the young woman remarked, rising and yanking the puppy by the leash. “But you’re sudden, my dear!”

“Miss Leroy is sick—going to have an operation.”

“She needed it, if ever a woman did!” Miss Delacourt tossed back over her shoulder as she tied the puppy to the gilded throne.“She’ll do!” Farson whispered encouragingly.

“She’ll do something,” MacNaughton growled gloomily.

It was not an auspicious outlook for the opening of the People’s Theater.

At eight o’clock that evening, the new playhouse was fairly well filled with what the local press calls a “highbrow audience.” Of these, not a few had come to scoff, for from the beginning the newspapers, led by the Beacon, had taken the People’s Theater as a pet toy with which to play during the silly season. It was variously described as the “Sulfur Extravaganza,” the “Cowboy Show,” or the “Arizona ThÉÂtre FranÇais.”

For ever since that fatal luncheon, the editor of the Beacon had directed the most skillful members of his celebrated stiletto gang in their sneers at Brainard. To the New York newspaper mind it was simply inconceivable that a man with a great fortune could put it to so purely childish a use as running a popular theater. A few friendly souls, however, were scattered up and down the house—those who follow the banner of “new ideas” wherever it may wave; and there were a few of the “people”—a very few—on free tickets.

As the curtains slowly parted, Brainard, sitting alone in the rear of the house, regretted more than ever that they had attempted to open with Lear. There were surely some in the audience whose memories, like his, would carry them back to the godlike fury of the elder Salvini. What could they make of the squat figure, the perspiring muscularity of Dudley Warner?

As the fated king waddled forth and began, Brainard shut his eyes. He opened them suddenly on hearing:

What shall Cordelia do? Love, and be silent.

It was Louisiana in walk and bearing,—the swagger from Iole, Kansas,—but the voice was rich and sweet, with an unpremeditated, girlish modulation that suggested depths of feeling unsuspected.

The audience, puzzled, was respectful through Cordelia’s humble replies, until the young actress essayed her first long speech:

You have begot me, bred me, loved me; I
Return those duties back as are right fit . . .
Haply when I shall wed,
That lord must take my—my—

Louisiana stumbled at the word, then brought out triumphantly:

My fist—

There was a ripple of amusement. Miss Delacourt heard it, flushed defiance in an un-Cordelia-like manner, and tore through the concluding lines. She got on well enough in the short responses, but the critics were waiting—as was Brainard, with trepidation—to see what the girl would make of her next long speech.

Alas! Miss Louisiana sailed in, as she would have said, to paint the lines. She drew herself up in all her girlish dignity.

I yet beseech your majesty,
If for I want that glib and oily part
To speak and purpose not; since what I well intend
I’ll do’t before I speak—that you make known—

A frightened look came over the girl’s face. “She is rattled,” Brainard said to himself, “and will break!”

Evidently the audience thought so, too, and there was a painful hush, in which MacNaughton’s efforts to whisper the words from the side could be heard.

“It is no—no—oh, hang it all, how does the talk go?” Louisiana muttered audibly, swinging on her heel toward the wings.

There was a roar of laughter from the house. With one contemptuous glance at the audience, Cordelia walked deliberately into the wings, and, returning in fierce haste, finished her speech. As she made her exit at the end of the scene, she jerked the train of her dress and gave it a kick in good vaudeville style. The galleries caught fire, and began to stamp and hoot. Louisiana turned and distinctly made a face, as a child might, at her tormentors. The applause was furious. It lasted so long that to resume the play with any degree of seriousness seemed utterly impossible.

At the end of the act, the manager pushed the unwilling Cordelia out upon the stage. She made a sulky little bow and another face. There were calls and whistles. She was a hit. But Lear!

Brainard, laughing in spite of himself, bit his lips with mortification. After this nothing could bring the audience to take the performance seriously. The galleries began to guy Warner, and to exchange repartee with the fool.

Fortunately, Cordelia did not appear during the next two acts. When she came on at the conclusion of the fourth act, for the affecting scene with the blind king, the gallery received her uproariously. She was white, with set lips, and she threw herself into her lines with a fine scorn of the mirthful house. When her memory failed her, she cut or improvised with fluent inspiration.

“She’s acting!” Farson whispered in amazement to Brainard.

“Yes, she’s acting, but they don’t know it!”For the house, having amused itself once with Miss Delacourt, refused to take her seriously, and was ready to explode with derisive mirth at any unconventional gesture, any wrong accent. Poor Louisiana gave them enough openings; but she held herself steadily, and was winning her way with the sweetness of her voice and her real charm, when, alas, there came a long, hard line. She wavered, tried to bluff it out, but broke down, burst into tears, and fled to the wings.

“Poor child! It was too much for her,” Brainard murmured, while Farson tried to hiss down the laughter.

It would not down, however. Finally Brainard rose and walked down the aisle to the front. Holding up his hand to still the noise, he said:

“Miss Delacourt came to us merely as a pupil. We were compelled to ask her to take the difficult rÔle of Cordelia at five hours’ notice, owing to the sudden illness of Miss Leroy. I think that Miss Delacourt deserves our thanks and our sympathy, instead of these jeers.”

There was silence, but Lear was doomed. The critics had left, and others followed. Those that stayed until the curtain swept together for the last time snickered contemptuously over the affair. Louisiana had saved the occasion from dismal dullness; she had turned Lear into a farce!

VII

The pleasant drawing-room and the library of the theater, which were on the second floor above the foyer, had been thrown open after the performance, and a few well-wishers of the enterprise lingered there to examine the new playhouse and to meet the shamefaced members of the company, to whom Brainard was giving a supper. Miss Delacourt did not appear with the others.

“She’s probably gone home, poor girl,” Farson said, as Brainard started to find her. He went directly to the dressing rooms and knocked at one of the closed doors. He had to knock twice before a sulky voice replied irritably:

“Well, come in!”

Louisiana had torn off the blond wig in which she had played Cordelia and tossed it into a corner. She had also removed the embroidered gold bodice of her costume and put on a rumpled dressing sack, and was sitting curled up on her long train, the big puppy in her lap. She was pulling his ears; her brown hair fell about his head. It was plain that she had been crying.“What do you want?” she asked crossly, recognizing Brainard.

“I came to—to thank you for helping us in our emergency this evening,” Brainard stammered.

“Helping! That’s a smooth word, I must say!” the girl flashed. “You may like that sort of help; but it’s the last you’ll get from me, I reckon!”

“I hope not,” Brainard protested heartily. “You saved the performance from being just a soggy failure, anyway.”

He could not help smiling at the memory of her saucy antics, yet the picture of childish despair she presented, crumpled, with her hair falling about the puppy’s head, roused another unfamiliar feeling of sympathy and pity. She was such a forlorn little person, for all the bravado of her speech!

“Is that what you call saving it?” Louisiana turned the puppy from her lap and devoted all her passion to scorn. “Saving! To make yourself a guy, to be ‘it’ for the merry haw-haws of the smart Alecks in New York! I must say I don’t like your taste. I’d rather fail in some other way.” She pushed back her falling hair and tied it excitedly in a knot, then shrank into her dressing gown and glared at Brainard very much like a kitten that has been cornered and is ruffled, “Let me tell you right here, dear sir, if you are the big gun responsible for this whole show, you haven’t got much to be proud of!”

“I heard you say that once before,” Brainard admitted humbly. “You said it was rotten, and I guess it is. But we are going to try to make it better.”

“Yes, try! You’d better try. I haven’t seen much acting, but I’ve seen road shows in one-horse towns back in the State of Kansas that could play all over your swell outfit. You think you are uplifting the theater, do you? What do you know about the theater, anyway? You’d better go right out to Iole, or over in the Bowery, and look at a ten-twent’-thirt’ show and learn something about play-acting. This young ladies’ boarding-school sissy show—oh, why did I ever come to you? I’d have learned more in a Kansas City variety!”

She crossed the room to hunt up a cigarette, and puffed the smoke with a disdainful shrug of her thin shoulders, walking to and fro in the small dressing room, kicking her dress about like a football, and generally emitting sparks.

“So I saved your show from being too awfully dull—at the expense of my reputation!”

Brainard could not help laughing at this display of childish vanity. She was a child attempting to be dignified with something more than a child’s intelligence. He suppressed his laughter and let her emotion explode.

“What do you think those writer-guys in the front row are going to say about Louisiana Delacourt to-morrow morning? They’ll hand me the merry laugh, that’s all. I’ll be a deader in the profession after this. Anyway, I’ll have to make up another name.”

“Your name wasn’t on the program, you know,” Brainard suggested soothingly. Louisiana merely cast him a withering glance. “Of course, our company isn’t what it should be yet,” he admitted. “We’ll try to give you a better chance—”

“You’ll have to do some mighty smart trying,” the girl sneered fiercely. “You highbrows think all you’ve got to do is to open a theater and print ‘Ideals’ in big letters on the program, and the public will run to your show. Folks have been going to the theater some before you undertook to uplift it!”

“Do you think they do good work at the other theaters?”

“They ain’t all they might be, perhaps, but they’re so much more in the game than you are, Mr. Head-in-the-Clouds, that you can’t see ’em at all, at all! And to start off with Shakespeare, of course!”She sniffed outrageously.

“Lear was a mistake.”

“I should say it was!” she agreed with infinite sarcasm. “Why don’t you look around and see what the others are doing—what the horrid trust is putting on? They know their business, anyway.”

“Oh, come—you are a little hard on us!”

“I mean it. . . . Now, if you don’t mind stepping along, I’m going to shake off this meal sack and hike home to bed. Good-by to high art for me, thank you!”

Brainard started for the door on this broad hint, but paused with his hand on the knob.

“Miss Delacourt,” he said, facing the angry girl, “I came here to-night to say to you what I sincerely believe—that you have in you the making of a fine actress. I gather from what you have said about our undertaking that my opinion means nothing to you. But let me assure you that I didn’t see your mistakes to-night as much as the spirit and the talent—the very great talent, if I am not mistaken.”

“Very kind of you, I am sure,” the girl snapped.

“I don’t wish to persuade you to stay with us against your inclination. In our present shape, we can’t give you what you need.”

“I should think not!”“One of my purposes, however, in this enterprise was to discover just such talent as I think you have, and develop it. Perhaps, if I can’t help you in one way to develop your talent, I can in another.”

Miss Delacourt deigned to pause in her toilette to stare at Brainard.

“I’m sure you have the real thing in you, even after this one unfortunate performance. I can’t tell whether the vein will hold deep, whether you have the character to develop it thoroughly, or will be content with the superficial success you might easily achieve in one of the commercial theaters. But I want to help you to do better than that—to give your talent a chance.”

“Well?”

“You must go where you can study—where you can see good acting also. You must go abroad—to England and France and Germany.”

The girl’s eyes opened wider and wider. She murmured:

“But that would take a sight of time and money, and I haven’t a cent in the world!”

“You have the time, at your age, and I can give you all the money you need,” he went on earnestly. “To-morrow Mr. Farson and I will talk the matter over with you and decide on what’s the best way to go about it.”Louisiana threw back her head, as if to embrace the splendid vision opened before her. Still gazing at Brainard to see whether he really meant it all, or was perpetrating a cruel joke, she gave a long sigh. There was something pathetically wistful and desirous in her small face that stirred Brainard strongly. He seemed to be looking into a little starved soul that was trying to grasp the meaning of his promise.

“You don’t mean—”

She began and stopped. Her look wavered for one moment, as if an unpleasant idea had crossed her mind and made her doubt Brainard’s disinterestedness. Brainard understood the expression. Probably in her short experience of life she had met with little real generosity from men.

“I mean exactly what I said—and nothing more!” he added with meaning emphasis.

The girl’s face cleared with wonderful rapidity. Once more it had the eager, wistful expression of the child.

“My, but you are a good one!” she exclaimed at last, convinced of his earnestness and his singleness of purpose. “After all those fancy compliments I just passed you, too!”

“I guess we deserved a good part of what you said. Perhaps you’ll save the day for us again sometime—when you come back.”“I sure hope I can! But not that way!” she blushed. “You mean it all—the study and travel? To go to Paris?”

“And London and Berlin and Vienna,” Brainard added with a smile. “And a lot of hard work, too, remember!”

“That never rattled me!” Louisiana exclaimed, gathering the sleepy pup into her arms and hugging him until he yelped. Presently she held out a hand to Brainard with an expression on her mobile face more mature than he had yet seen there. “Some day I’ll tell you my story, and then you’ll see what it means to me. You’ve given me—life!”

He left her hastily to spare her the embarrassment of a second fit of tears. In spite of all the humiliation that the evening had brought him, Brainard returned to his house in a happy and contented frame of mind.

VIII

When Brainard confided to Farson the plan he had formed for Louisiana Delacourt’s education, the younger man looked sharply at him for one moment as if he also suspected ulterior motives in this unexpected interest in the young woman, who had given the People’s Theater such dubious notoriety by her performance of Cordelia. In that rapid interchange of glances between the two men, Brainard felt for the first time a slight antagonism to his cheerful and companionable secretary. Why should Farson immediately infer that there was anything more than a disinterested desire on his part to help a poor and promising girl, whom fate had rather casually thrown in his path? Was it necessary that in the theater world this should inevitably be the implication,—that there could be no simple kindness between men and women!

“No!” he exclaimed, with a slight smile, answering Farson’s glance, “I don’t mean that!”

“Why do you think that it would be a good thing for Louisiana to go abroad now? She’s got a good deal to learn that she could learn here just as well,” the secretary observed evasively.

Brainard smiled more openly. It was plain enough that the young secretary did not like the idea of losing sight of their Kansas star, of whom he had seen a good deal in the course of business these last months.

“She’s nothing but a kid, you know,” he added in an indifferent tone.

“Exactly! And it’s just because she is so much of a child that I think the best thing for her is to have a lot of new experience of a totally different kind from any she’s likely to get over here. What she wants is to grow,—not learn grammar and elocution. She must develop in every way to become the actress that is in her, and that development she will get more easily somewhere out of her old environment—apart from all the inspiration that will come to her eager little mind by seeing real acting and real plays, of which there is much more just at present in Europe than in New York.”

“I see you have thought it all out,” the secretary replied dryly.

“Yes, I have thought a good deal about Louisiana since last night,” Brainard admitted.

It had occurred to him possibly in the course of this thought that the secretary’s growing intimacy with the girl was not altogether advantageous. His nature was too generous, however, to entertain this consideration seriously. The idea of rivalry between them for the girl’s interest was too ridiculous to be thought of, and yet he was forced to recognize in himself a trace of that subtle sex jealousy that seems inevitable wherever two men are concerned with one woman, no matter how trivial the occasion. He put it summarily out of his head.

“She won’t be away for always, Ned,” he observed good-naturedly. “And we must give the girl her chance—it’s the least we can do after encouraging her to come on here and join our organization, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” the secretary agreed more cordially.

When Brainard told MacNaughton of his purpose, the old actor expressed an unfeigned and unflattering surprise.

“What do you want to turn that silly’s little head for?” he roared, flourishing his cigar. “Send her abroad to study! You’d much better send her to a grammar school or a young lady’s fem sem where she could learn ordinary deportment. She’ll never make an actress.”

“I don’t agree with you,” Brainard replied quickly. “She’s the best we’ve got already.”Farson watched the two with an amused smile. The old actor shrugged his shoulders in mute disgust.

“It isn’t saying much either,” the patron of the People’s Theater continued somewhat tartly. “Cordelia wasn’t the worst that happened last night by any means.”

“My God!” the Scotsman groaned fervently. “I hope nothing as bad will ever happen to me again in this life.”

Brainard’s doubts of MacNaughton’s fitness for his position of manager grew rapidly from this moment into a conviction that eventually produced difficulties in the hitherto harmonious management of the theatrical enterprise. Another disturbing current set in motion by the young person from Iole, Kansas!

Brainard and Farson discussed at some length the details of Louisiana’s trip. The secretary was firmly convinced that some sort of chaperone should be provided for the girl. She needed a duenna or guardian, he said, to keep her out of scrapes, if ever a woman did. When this idea was suggested to Miss Delacourt, it received an immediate and positive discouragement.

“I don’t know any female whom I could endure to have trailing around after me,” she said. “And what’s the use, anyhow? They won’t eat me up over there, I reckon. I’ve always managed to look out for myself so far, and I’m not likely to forget how now I’ve something worth doing to keep me busy. . . . No, I’ll go it alone, thank you, or not at all until I’m ready to select my own guardian.”

With this she cast Farson a belligerent look that delighted Brainard. When the secretary tried to explain in circumspect terms the manifold dangers to which a young woman traveling alone was necessarily exposed, she said:

“I’m going to take the pup along. A good dog is worth any two chaperones in case of trouble.”

Brainard observed finally:

“I think Miss Delacourt is right. She will get on very well anywhere by herself. She has the habit of independence.”

“You see!” the young woman remarked, nodding loftily to Farson. “You are too conventional for the theater. I have the habit of perfect independence, as your boss said. And I don’t propose to give it up in a hurry either.”

With this second jab at the secretary she squeezed her dog in an ecstasy of good spirits.

This important question being settled, there remained merely the plan of work and travel, which Brainard undertook to prepare and to which he gave much careful consideration. Then the passage was engaged, and the morning of the sailing the three had a pleasant breakfast together at a little down-town restaurant. Louisiana appeared in what she called “the proper make-up for her new part,”—a smart traveling costume, with fresh hat, gloves, boots, and parasol. Brainard was glad to see that she had made such an immediate and natural use of the liberal means he had placed at her disposal through his secretary, although the transformation worked by her new costume took away a certain quality of primitive girlishness that was pleasant to him. Louisiana was emerging rapidly from her chrysalis under the stimulus of the opportunity he had provided for her. As he sat back and watched her spar with Farson, he wondered whether the old Louisiana would ever return from Europe. What sort of woman would take the place of the girl who had made her dÉbut in the most unconventional Cordelia the English stage had ever seen?

At any rate everything was spontaneous in her now,—not a trace of self-consciousness in her attitude to him as her benefactor, and all the simplicity and directness of the child which had first touched him.

“He says he’s going to write a piece for the theater and put me in,” Louisiana remarked turning to Brainard. “He’d better let me see it first—I’ll give him a few points most men writers overlook. . . . You’ll keep the theater open until I get back?”

“Longer than that, we hope!” Brainard laughed.

“I want to make my dÉbut there—my real dÉbut,” she said importantly.

“I promise you we’ll keep it open for that!”

“You’d better fire the whole bunch and start over,” she observed thoughtfully. . . .

At the last moment, when Farson had already gone down the gangway, the girl drew Brainard to one side and uttered the first serious words they had had since their talk in her dressing room the night of Lear.

“It’s no use saying thanks, you know!”

“I don’t want you to thank me.”

“I know you don’t and I’m not—but I want you to know I understand.”

“What?”

“What you’re doing for me. . . . I’ll make good.”

“I believe you will!”

“Good-by!”

She gave him a lean little hand that gripped his nervously. The last he saw of Louisiana Delacourt as he went over the ship’s side, she was chasing her dog into some stranger’s deck cabin. As he made his way from the dock towards the People’s Theater that morning, his world seemed less gay and amusing with Louisiana out of it.

IX

After the inglorious failure of Lear, they tried She Stoops to Conquer, with Cecilia Pyce, an English actress of advancing years and a large and bony physique, whom MacNaughton much vaunted. Brainard suspected that Cissie, as Mac called her, had been the Scotsman’s sweetheart in her palmier days, and thus he was now paying his sentimental debts by giving her a lucrative position at his patron’s expense. However, nothing better offered at present, and Miss Pyce at least knew how to act in the solid old English fashion. The people came sparingly, and sat in the first four rows of the big auditorium, which was a lonesome sort of place these days.

It was little better when the company essayed an “original American play”—as it was advertised—that Farson had culled from the mass of manuscripts he had examined. May Magic lasted a week, and then fell to pieces before an audience consisting of the author and about twenty of his friends. The management could not even give their tickets away. At May Magic the critics took final leave of the People’s Theater with such parting kicks as this:

What in the name of common sense is the amateurish aggregation at the so-called People’s Theater trying to do? In what sense is it a popular theater? The “people” are conspicuous by their absence. The worthy gentleman who is spending his money giving the public fifth-rate productions of English classics and such rejected modern masterpieces as May Magic had better go over to Broadway and learn his trade.

Brainard was thankful that Louisiana was safe on the high seas on her way to Munich, and would not see this article!

Somewhere Farson ran across a statuesque young woman of German extraction who spoke English as if she had a cracker in her mouth, and became persuaded that the mission of their organization was to introduce to the American public the new plays of the advanced European theater.

“We must become the theater of ideas,” he said to Brainard.

So, with the assistance of Miss Beatrice Klinker in leading roles, the People’s Theater became frankly “highbrow” and went after Brieux, Hauptmann, Strindberg, and the tribe of the peculiar. Brainard poured out money like water in buying rights at exorbitant prices, in preparing new scenery, and in expensive additions to the company. He foresaw that at this rate, instead of starting a chain of popular theaters across the continent, he would have all he could do to maintain one organization in New York, with possibly a couple of road companies. For the receipts were always negligible. To such comparatively modest limits had his great Idea already shrunken. If he had not thus far succeeded in enlightening any large section of the American Public in dramatic art, he himself had received a very thorough and costly lesson, not merely in the drama, but in human nature and life. That, however, had not been his purpose!

It was not until the People’s Theater produced an erotic piece by a new Danish writer, whose name was unknown to the critics, that the house began to fill.

“We’ve struck our pace!” Farson declared jubilantly. He exercised all his journalistic ingenuity in whetting the appetite of the New York public for the play with immediate results in the box office. Brainard, although he had no high opinion of the play, felt relieved not to encounter at each performance the same dreary waste of empty seats. He comforted himself with the thought that if the Public could be induced to come to a “sex play,” they might be captured for less hectic entertainments. MacNaughton and Farson, with the easy sophistry of the theater, maintained that what people cared to see must be good art and stoutly defended the Danish piece.

But their good luck did not hold. At the Saturday matinÉe of the first week the police visited the theater and the curtain was ordered down after the bedroom scene in the second act. There was a mild demonstration among the audience, whose curiosity was defeated, and the price of their tickets was repaid to all who demanded it. The press made considerable noise over the event.

“We’re made!” MacNaughton announced in great excitement. Farson was busy with the reporters, trying to get the most out of this unexpected bit of publicity. Brainard set forth in search of the virtuous police commissioner to protest in the name of outraged Art. But the commissioner was impervious to Art.

“That sort of show don’t go in New York,” he pronounced austerely, in reply to Brainard’s argument that the play had been given even more boldly in Vienna and Berlin and was held to be a “moral document” by the best European critics. The police commissioner seemed to think that New York had a different and better morality than that obtaining in Europe. He was obdurate. When Brainard reported his failure to his associates, Farson took it very lightly.“All we’ll have to do,” he suggested, “is to make some slight changes—put a screen in front of the bed scene—and see the inspector. I’ll take care of him.”

But Brainard refused to pay the police to be allowed to produce his play, and so on Monday night the People’s Theater remained dark.

“And just look at all that money!” MacNaughton wailed, as something of a crowd began to form in front of the theater for the first time. “The governor is a miserable puritan,” he said to Farson, wringing his hands. “To think of turning his back on his luck just because of the morality of the New York police! He ought to run a Sunday school.”

Brainard was not to be moved, although the theater would have to remain closed for a week until the company could prepare another play. He was deeply disgusted with the whole affair, with the notoriety as well as the cheap pretense of morality by the police commissioner. For the first time in four years his faith in the great Idea began to waver, and he longed to escape from New York to the more vital air of Arizona. There had been some difficulty recently with the pumps at the Melody mine, and he might well take this opportunity of running down to Monument. Once there it would be a temptation to abandon the great Idea altogether and to remain in the mountains developing the copper mine. Or he could buy a coffee plantation in Jalapa, as he had once fleetingly thought of doing, and settle himself in Mexico like a medieval prince. Possibly the little seÑorita Marie had not yet found another Prince and had waited all these years for his expected return. The vision of that beautiful semitropical valley dominated by the snowy crown of the old volcano returned to his memory with alluring colors. Life in such a far-off Eden with a gentle creature as mistress of a rose-covered haÇienda was an inviting contrast to the glare and vulgarity of New York. . . .

Brainard and the secretary left the theater in glum silence, each possessed by an unhappy train of thought. On their way uptown they passed a billboard on which some flaming posters displayed certain tempting scenes from a soul-and-body-stirring play called The Stolen Bonds, now being given for the first time in New York. Brainard paused before the gaudy billboard.

“What the public really likes!” Farson commented with a grin.

Brainard remembered Louisiana’s angry taunt,—“Go and see a good melodrama—see what folks are willing to pay real money for!”

“Let’s take it in!” he exclaimed, seizing his companion’s arm. “We haven’t anything else to do this evening.”

“We’ll get all the goods before we reach the show,” the secretary observed, pointing to another series of immense posters that represented a gloomy bank vault in which a masked gentleman was holding a lantern above the prostrate form of a woman. “They’re not afraid of giving away their story!”

“Perhaps we shall find the great American play we have been hunting for all this year,” Brainard replied, as they came into the garish foyer of the theater. At one side was the entrance to a brilliant saloon, which seemed part of the establishment. “Democratic and convivial this,” he joked, thinking of the dainty “tea room” at the People’s.

There were only box seats left. When the two pushed aside the plush curtains that concealed these luxurious retreats, the curtain was up and the first act had started before a house packed with prosperous-looking citizens and their women.

“Not a dead seat in the house, I’ll bet!” whispered the secretary.

The scene represented the inside of an office, with a large safe at one side. The short, black-haired heroine was striving ineffectually to bar the way of a brawny villain, who had her covered with a revolver in one hand, and with the other whipped an ether cone from an inner pocket. She was rapidly crowded into the vault, where she succumbed in due time, after a muscular struggle and curdling shrieks, to the ether cone. Thereupon the burglar set busily to work to fill an enormous sample case with piles of yellow currency and bundles conveniently labeled Bonds, in large letters, so that a child might read. The villain then departed, carefully locking the door of the safe upon the etherized heroine.

But the villain had reckoned without the telephone. In the next scene the stenographer-heroine slowly grabbed the ether cone from her face, gaspingly crawled to the corner, where the telephone hung conspicuously, and called Central. Presently the bolts began to grumble, and were shot back by a young man who rushed in and dragged the tottering woman from the safe, while she murmured in a dying whisper audible for two blocks:

“The ferry, Jasper! The ferry! The thief!” Then the noble girl fell swooning and apparently lifeless.

“There’s something doing!” Farson remarked with an appreciative grin, and added with a peculiar expression, “They’ve taken more than a hint from my one play.”“And several more from life,” Brainard muttered.

“I believe it is life through the medium of my play—but altered somehow,” Farson observed.

“Oh! much altered!”

The next scene was labeled, “At the Ferry Slip—San Francisco.” As the curtain rose, the villain—no longer masked, but with a long ulster concealing all but his sinister eyes—was deftly transferring himself and his sample case, stuffed with money and bonds, on board the ferry-boat. The bell rang—business in the wings. Then on rushed the hero-lover, clutching vainly at the disappearing sample case. There was a desperate tussle between the hero and the villain, while the dummy passengers on the deck above obligingly turned their backs. The villain cut loose from his pursuer with a wicked knife, threw the case upon the moving boat, and leaped two yards after it, leaving the prostrate figure of the hero-lover half dropping over the slip. The stenographer-heroine appeared—in a neat traveling suit—and pulled her lover safely ashore. Curtain.

“Bravo!” Farson shouted enthusiastically. “If it isn’t exactly life, it’s the way we’d all like to have it happen, anyway.”

“It may be nearer life than you think,” Brainard assented with a queer smile. In this scene he had been able to get a good view of the heroine of the piece. Beneath the coarse make-up he thought he recognized familiar features, and felt sure that he had heard in real life that pert, nasal voice which had just uttered the last speech—“Escaped! We’ll track him into the darkest wilds of Africa!”

“Recognize a friend?” Farson inquired. Brainard nodded. They turned over the leaves of their program to find the name of the heroine. It was Lorilla Walters, in large black type.

“Lorilla,” Farson murmured. “Good stage name.”

“It sounds like her!” Brainard agreed.

Just then the curtain went up for the third act. Here was a rapid succession of scenes representing the pursuit and escape of the villain in the Arizona desert, with one very lurid background of flaming mountains and sagebrush plain. Pistol shots and a chase through an adobe haÇienda outside a Mexican village concluded the act.

“Whew, these people have wire nerves!” Farson commented, wiping his brow.

“They have treated the story rather freely,” Brainard remarked grimly. Farson talked nervously.

“Louisiana would like that!” he said. “There’s something doing all the time. I bet that’s Lorilla. What do you say to trying her at the People’s? She’s a trifle broad in her methods, but sound—and lets herself go all the time. It’s just a bit loud in tone.”

“Not louder than life sometimes.”

“It carries home—look at the audience!”

In the fourth act the villain was at last cornered by the stenographer-heroine and the hero-lover, aided by a United States cruiser, which intercepted the villain and his sample case as they were about to sail away from the port of Vera Cruz on a Spanish steamer. The captain of the steamer on which the villain had taken refuge with his sample case blasphemously defied the flag of the United States with loud curses. But a booming shot from the wings knocked his smokestack out of service, and brought him to his senses. The captain thereafter gracefully received the smart American lieutenant who came aboard in holiday uniform and collared the villain, denounced by the heroine, as he cowered behind the fallen smokestack—still wearing the long ulster.

They applauded vigorously and were about to drift out with the crowd of candy-eating females and their escorts, when the curtains of the box were parted by a gentleman in evening clothes, who stood smiling, holding his spotless silk hat in one hand and extending the other to Brainard.

“Hello!” the stranger said easily, as if he were greeting a casual acquaintance whom he had not seen for several days. He came forward into the box, and sat on the edge of a chair, dangling his glossy silk hat. “Saw you from behind,” he added, smiling slightly upon Brainard, whose surprise was evident.

“You, Hollinger!” the latter exclaimed, recovering himself. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, in the show business,—same as you,” he added with a little laugh.

“The last time I saw you—”

“Was in that Jalapa hotel where I had the pleasure of delivering a little lecture on life for your benefit,” the fight-trust man supplied. “You profited by it at once—that very night, if I remember rightly. Rarely does a teacher of morals get such a rapid reaction!”

“Yes!” Brainard laughed. “Necessity pointed the moral to your talk with a kick. I left on a mule car, and got away just in time.”

“So Calloway told me the next morning. We tried to keep your friends interested in Jalapa until the boat sailed. I take it that we succeeded.”

“Yes, I owe you a great deal for that good turn.”

“Don’t mention it,” Hollinger murmured, slipping into the chair, “always ready to serve a friend.”

Brainard introduced Farson, who knew the “king of the prize ring trust” by sight, for Hollinger had been a celebrated figure on the Coast in the days before the graft trials. The three chatted for a time while the auditorium emptied.

“How did you like our play?” he inquired casually.

“Your play! It’s suspiciously like mine.”

“Perhaps we drew from the same sources.”

“How did you get into the theatrical business?” Brainard inquired.

“I got into it in a rather roundabout way,” the fight-trust magnate explained. “You remember the event at Jalapa? The American papers were full of it at the time. I was interested in the moving picture concession for the States. We expected to make big money out of it. But they had another spasm of virtue in this country about that time, and we were shut out of the best circuits. So from the movies I got into vaudeville and then into the regular show business. Have a couple of circuits on the Coast and interests in the East also. This is one of my companies. They’ve done a tremendous business out West in this thing—did it appeal to you?”

He smiled genially at Brainard, and added: “We couldn’t work in the haÇienda scene,—roses, moonlight, Orizaba, pretty Mexican girl, and the rest,—it took too much scenery.”

“We thought it was a trifle overdrawn,” Brainard observed.

“Oh, the theater demands that, you know,—exaggeration. Art is never quite like nature. Even Milton threw it on thick at times, if I recollect. . . . But it stirs the blood—that’s what you want in these dull times. People come to the theater to feel, their lives are so dull. That’s the first thing I learned in the show business. Give the public something to tease the nerves, keep ’em on the jump. And the second thing I learned was that you must always hold up a high moral standard. It never pays in the long run to cater to the small class that can afford to think about morals as freely as they act.” He looked at Brainard meaningly. “I saw your show last week,” he explained. “It’s not really tough, but it don’t pay to do that sort of thing. Most people, of course, are not half as good as they like to think they are. But even the worst want their art and literature better than they know they are and better than they think their neighbors are. That’s the way they square themselves with life,” he concluded sententiously.

This was the second time, Brainard reflected, that he had received a valuable lesson in ethics from the fight-trust magnate. He understood now why Hollinger had been reading Milton when he first made his acquaintance on the Overland Limited. He was a business philosopher.

“If you are going to deal with people,” he added gently, “you must know how they act and feel about things.”

“I suppose that is why you let the heroine capture the thief in this piece?” Brainard remarked.

“Precisely! The clever young dramatist who knocked the thing together for me was all for another ending, a more convincing one, perhaps, where the heroine was bought off for a good share of the bonds and currency. But although admitting the truth of his reasoning, I could not permit him to ruin the success of our play. We were compelled to violate nature again, and in deference to the public’s unquenchable thirst for Virtue we allowed the slow-moving heroine to accomplish the dire purpose of her vengeful passions with the assistance of the government. In its present form our play is terribly satisfying to our public. It gratifies especially that common human desire to get somebody. Half our criminal justice is built upon the same unpleasant trait of human nature. . . . By the way,” he remarked, interrupting the flow of his philosophical analysis, “I almost forgot! There’s a friend of yours in behind who wants to see you. I promised to bring you back. You’ve no objections?”

“None at all!” Brainard laughed. “You see our encounter didn’t turn out quite like the play, fortunately for me!”

“So I understand,” Hollinger replied demurely, holding the curtain aside to let the others precede him.

X

They found the leading lady waiting for them on the darkened stage. She was dressed quite handsomely in her street costume, with the inevitable fur coat that seems the most characteristic mark of her profession. Without her makeup and stage costume she looked much older than Brainard remembered her to be and also stouter. But her dark face and flashing eyes still preserved an air of confident assurance in her good looks that had characterized Krutzmacht’s stenographer.

“Good evening, Mr. Wilkins!” she said promptly as the men approached her. At that unfortunate nom de guerre Farson laughed outright. Hollinger came to the rescue.

“Mr. Edgar Brainard, of the new People’s Theater; Miss Lorilla Walters of The Stolen Bonds company,” the fight-trust man said with a little cough.

“We seem both to have changed names,” Brainard observed, shaking hands with the leading lady.“Walters is my stage name,” the former stenographer snapped.

“Wilkins was mine—for a few hours!” Brainard laughed.

There followed an awkward pause. In spite of the amiable greeting, Brainard could see fire in the woman’s dark eyes and realized that it was not simply for the pleasure of meeting her former antagonist again that she had got Hollinger to bring him behind the scenes. He realized also from the determined bearing and solid form of the woman he had once unceremoniously locked up in Krutzmacht’s safe for an hour, that she possessed a kind of vindictive energy which might easily become troublesome to any man she disliked. For a brief moment he wished that a wayward fate had not led his steps on this evening into the Boulevard Theater. But it was so patently absurd that the woman could in any way touch him now after all these years that he easily put aside the thought. He had led his new life so long, tested himself with men and affairs so thoroughly that his early adventures in Krutzmacht’s service seemed to him more like a youthful escapade than reality.

During this mute encounter Farson and Hollinger watched the two with interest. Hollinger leaned against one of the properties of the last act in The Stolen Bonds, a slightly satirical smile on his lips as if he found much intellectual amusement in the situation.

“That’s a pretty lively show you have made out of our little affair,” Brainard remarked at last to the leading lady. “You’ve touched up the story all along and the dÉnouement isn’t according to the facts as I remember them.”

Miss Walters gave a little twitch to her short veil as she snapped meaningly:

“Perhaps it isn’t finished yet!”

“As our friend Hollinger has been proving to me,” Brainard continued in his scoffing tone, “Art and Nature don’t always jibe. The artist has always found fault with dull fact, and he gets his revenge upon the real world as you took yours to-night in the play.”

“One gets it somehow,” Miss Walters replied enigmatically.

“If you are going to discuss Art and Nature,” Hollinger put in genially, “let’s go to some place where we can have supper.”

“A good idea,” Brainard agreed. “Come home with me. My man usually has something ready for me at this time.”

He felt that something more vital than a discussion of Art and Nature was impending and thought that his own house would be a better place for an animated interview than a public cafÉ. So the four picked their way in the gloom among the bulky properties of The Stolen Bonds to the stage exit and there found a cab, which carried them quickly to the little house in Gramercy Park. Miss Walters did not open her mouth during the ride; Hollinger and Farson maintained a factitious conversation on politics, and the contrasts between San Francisco and New York. The fight-trust man ridiculed “progressivism,” which was just then coming into vogue, shrewdly pointing out that it merely cloaked the aspirations of “the little fellows” to “get big Capital,” and praised California as the only place for an American to live in. From time to time Brainard eyed the actress from his corner of the cab, wondering what her relations with his versatile acquaintance might be. She did not seem interested in the conversation and stared steadily into the street.

There were bottles and cold meats on the table in the dining room as Brainard had promised. Farson discovered in the pantry the ingredients for a hot dish, and Hollinger showed himself to be an expert in this sort of an impromptu feast. The three men were soon busy with chafing dish and corkscrew in a comradely way, but Miss Walters, refusing to lay aside her long fur coat and hat, sauntered about the cheerful room, examining carefully the pictures and prints upon the walls, the furniture and appointments, which though not especially luxurious were thoroughly comfortable.

“Is this your house?” she asked her host point blank, and when he nodded she remarked:

“A pretty cozy sort of place.”

“It is comfortable,” Brainard agreed, “and very convenient. I can’t stand hotels,” he added by way of excuse.

“Some of us have to stand ’em and be mighty thankful when they’re fit to live in.”

Not having any appropriate reply to this remark, Brainard urged the actress to lay aside her wraps and sit down before the fire, which he had stirred into a blaze. She grudgingly unbuttoned her coat and sat on the edge of the large chair he pushed to the hearth, stretching forth her worn shoes to the warmth, and hitching up her skirt in a slightly vulgar manner.

When Hollinger announced that his dish was ready, the four drew up at the table and had supper, which, thanks to Farson and the fight-trust man, was lively enough. They discussed theatrical matters, especially the Danish play on which the People’s had come to grief. Hollinger maintained that the trouble with the play was that it was neither moral nor immoral enough. It was simply too much like life. “If you are going in for vice, you must paint it red,” he pronounced. The leading lady listened and taciturnly ate her supper. Afterwards she accepted a cigarette and turned again to the fire. Brainard searched his brain for a topic that might interest her and finally asked:

“How long have you been on the stage, Miss Walters?”

“It was a good many years ago, the first show I was in,” she replied, and added with intention,—“before I met Krutzmacht.”

“Where was that?” he asked lightly.

“In Los Angeles in ninety-two.”

“You gave up the stage for a time?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “He wanted me to.”

“Oh!”

Supper being finished, Brainard led the way to the large living room on the floor above. Here there were books, pictures, and old theatrical bills that seemed to interest Hollinger. He and Farson remained at one end of the room and thus gave Brainard a further opportunity for conversation with Miss Walters. Somewhat softened by the good supper and the friendly reception, she began to talk more freely of herself, her early experiences on the stage in a small stock company that played in the little towns of central and southern California, until she met Herbert Krutzmacht, who happened to be in Los Angeles one night when she was playing. Brainard, who was curious to find out all he could about Krutzmacht, observed carelessly:

“You were working in his office when I—when we last met?”

“Yes—I was working for him,” she said shortly.

“Then why,” he asked suddenly, “did you try to sell him out to his enemies?”

“I had good reasons,” she replied, looking him defiantly in the face, “a woman’s reasons. He hadn’t played fair with me!”

“That is, hadn’t married you as you hoped he would?” Brainard suggested.

“I didn’t say that!” she flashed quickly, realizing that she was in danger of committing herself.

“Well, I hope the railroad people paid you well for your services.”

“They quit paying me, naturally, after you got over to Europe with the stuff they wanted and sold it to the Germans.”

“They dealt with the Germans instead,” Brainard laughed. “It might have paid better to stick by the old man to the end? . . . So, after we parted at Vera Cruz, you went back to the stage—into the legitimate?”“Mr. Hollinger suggested it when I met him at Jalapa. He got me a place in one of the San Francisco theaters a friend of his was running, and then later on when he went into the show business himself, he took me for one of his companies.”

“Do you like the work?”

“It’s as good as anything else,” the leading lady replied, “so long as you’ve got to work for your living.”

“Most of us have to do that.”

“Unless we are clever enough to get somebody else to do the work for us,” she sneered.

“Then I think we lose most of the fun.”

Miss Walters stared at him skeptically.

“What’s the use of your taking that lofty tone with me?”

Brainard laughed good-naturedly. He found in this case, as he had in so many others, that a little personal contact with an enemy modifies and humanizes any antagonism. “Eat with an enemy and lose your hate,” is an old proverb, the truth of which he was proving. In spite of the hardness and vulgarity of Miss Lorilla Walters, actress and stenographer, there was something pathetic in her commonplace struggle with life, which he felt through her brief admissions. She had been fighting all her life for herself with somewhat coarse weapons, the only ones she knew how to use, and her appearance, now that she had lost the advantage of youth and was declining towards middle age, her cheap clothes, her defiant manner,—all told of the losing game. He was already beginning to wonder what he could do for Krutzmacht’s old stenographer, wondering whether by any chance she could be fitted into the People’s company, when his amiable meditations were disagreeably interrupted by the actress.

“It’s no use your playing the great philanthropist with me,” she said truculently. “I know what you are.”

“What?”

“A crook.”

“You think so?”

“I happen to know it.”

“The trouble always has been from the moment I entered Krutzmacht’s office that afternoon that you have persisted in this wrong idea. You took me for a common thief then, and you think me a successful swindler now. Well, it happens that I am neither. So you can’t understand!”

She looked over the comfortable room, which for the moment they had to themselves, as Farson had taken Hollinger into the library.“You seem to have done very well by yourself,” she observed.

“I was Krutzmacht’s legitimate agent then, when I entered his office, and I have been his executor so to speak every since,”—and as she shrugged her shoulders skeptically, he added, “I haven’t a cent of my own—really not a cent; I am poorer than you!”

“You want me to believe that song? . . . How about the theater and the mine in Arizona? You see I have been following you up.”

“They belong to somebody else.”

“Indeed—to whom?”

“I shan’t tell you that!”

“Because you can’t. . . . They belong to me.”

“Prove your claim then!”

“And you will hand them over on a platter with a fine bow? . . . You are smooth!”

She looked into Brainard’s smiling face with an expression of perplexity.

“But until you can prove your claim, beyond doubt, I shall continue in possession both of the mine and of the theater as guardian of the property. And I shall fight you with all the resources I have until I am convinced that your claim is sound.”

The actress slowly walked to the fire and threw away the cigarette she had been smoking.“Well, I guess we understand each other,” she said in a less truculent voice.

“I think we do!”

“You are a curious sort of idiot,” she remarked musingly. “I don’t see why we should fight. There’s enough money for two from what the papers say about that mine.”

“There’s a great deal more than enough for two,” Brainard laughed, “in one sense, but only enough for one in another—the right one,” he added meaningly.

The actress watched him closely as he crossed the room to straighten a picture that hung awry on the wall. She swayed gently to and fro in the vulgar pose of the heroine of The Stolen Bonds, looking into the fire. When she glanced up she saw that Brainard was observing her, a slight smile on his lips. He was thinking that she had the temperament that might have made a good actress, but had been hopelessly spoiled by her bringing up and environment.

“Well?” he said. “Are you ready with the proof?”

“You are a queer sort of Willy,” she replied. “I don’t believe you and me can ever rightly understand each other.”

“I think I understand you,” Brainard laughed; “you want Krutzmacht’s money—that is quite intelligible! And you may not think so, but I am sorry for you—I would really like to help you out—get a better position for you!”

“But you won’t divide!”

“Never—all or nothing.”

“Do you know where I’m going to-night when I leave your swell little house? Over on Second Avenue into a third-class hotel where my mother and I get along with one bedroom between us. Hollinger don’t pay any big salaries!”

“I am sorry.”

“Krutzmacht treated me like most men treat women they’ve got cheap. I had no reason to be loyal to him, as I told you.”

“Unless,” Brainard suggested lightly, “you happened to be his wife!”

Miss Walters ignored the implication and continued explanatorily:

“When we lost you at Vera Cruz, and the railroad men I was working for had no more use for me, I was down and out. There didn’t seem to be anything for anybody from Krutzmacht’s money except what the Germans got and you! So I went into the show that I told you of. But it seems there was a good deal more property I didn’t know about—he was always close mouthed. You were clever enough to find that mine and keep it for yourself. . . . It wasn’t until you struck New York that anybody heard about it. Then the papers and the magazines were full of it and of you and of all the money you were throwing away on a theater.”

“Publicity is one of the penalties of success,” Brainard observed.

“It helped me to find you!”

Brainard bowed in acknowledgment.

“You don’t want any more trouble?” she suggested in a gentler tone than she had previously used.

“Don’t mind trouble,” Brainard retorted quickly.

“If I was content with a half million—”

“Why not make it two?”

XI

At this point Hollinger and Farson returned to the room. Hollinger looked quickly at the position of the two, smiled placidly, and helped himself to another cigar from the box on the table.

“Exchanging confidences?” he inquired.

“Miss Walters persists in acting all the time,” Brainard replied. “She thinks this is a sequel to the play and wants me to hand over to her a lot of money.”

“Sometimes,” Hollinger observed sententiously, “that’s the easiest way to square things, isn’t it?”

Brainard looked at the fight-trust man in astonishment. Was he an accomplice in a vulgar blackmail game?

“It’s not my way,” he said sharply.

“Half a loaf when no part of the loaf is really yours is always more enjoyable than a legal scrimmage over the whole loaf, it seems to me.”

“What do you mean?”

Hollinger threw himself into an easy-chair, lighted his cigar carefully, and beamed at Brainard.“Did it ever occur to you, my young friend,” he began, “that we four are, so to speak, all in the same boat? We are all adventurers—of that noble company of gentlemen and lady adventurers in life—to paraphrase the quaint motto of the Hudson Bay Company. Now in the course of the complicated tissue of adventure that happens to have brought us three together from very unlike walks in life, you”—he thrust the glowing point of his cigar towards Brainard,—“have proved to be the Star. You’re It! You hold the bag, so to speak. You seem to have shared some of its golden contents with our young friend here who wants to write plays, as he tells me. I do not happen to want anything for myself. I am perfectly disinterested in this case,—fortunately can afford to be. For I have other and sufficiently fat fish frying in my own little pan. So I can play the gracious rÔle of Wisdom. . . . Why not be generous to the lady who lost in this matter of the old Dutchman’s millions—you can afford it—and nothing becomes a young unmarried Idealist more than princely generosity with other people’s dollars.”

“But—” Brainard began.

“Pardon me—one moment—to finish clearing the ground. I don’t know the precise manner in which you came into possession of Herbert Krutzmacht’s money any more than I know exactly how he got it away from those who wanted it. I presume the methods were not essentially unlike. It never interests me, these details of acquisition,—to know just how our plutocratic masters have raked together their pelf. But the method of distribution does interest me tremendously. The rich usually show such little capacity for imagination or daring in the disposal of their wealth! However, that is another theme. . . . Now this lady, whose slender talent as an actress I have had the honor of supporting, thinks she has some cogent claim to the unearned increment of the deceased Dutchman. Her idea is probably fantastic—most of our ideas about ‘rights’ are—but it is a fixed idea with her!” He leaned forward and waved his cigar rhythmically to drive home his words. “Unless her idea is adequately gratified, I am afraid she will be unhappy and make you considerable trouble in the course of her effort to satisfy her quite unreasonable desire. VoilÀ tout, as the French say. Or if you prefer English, Better pay and forget, rather than save a few dollars and regret, my friend.”

“You are a good anarchist,” Farson observed.

“Thank you for the explanation. I know that I am a practical man. If our rich, our very rich citizens, would only recognize more frankly the truth I have been stating, they would be happier and so would we others. But they are very timid and conservative; they rarely get beyond libraries, museums, and hospitals. All dull and comparatively useless affairs!”

The fight-trust man sank back into his chair and smoked with half-closed eyes.

“Your talk is interesting, Hollinger, as always,” Brainard remarked, “but unfortunately this time I can’t follow your advice.”

“And why not?”

“Because it happens not to be my own money that Miss Walters desires.”

Hollinger waved one hand deprecatingly and murmured:

“A mere matter of words that.”

“No, I mean it! As I have been explaining to Miss Walters, I am really a poor man—”

“Poverty is a relative matter—science has demonstrated that.”

“Everything of Krutzmacht’s I hold as trustee.”

“Sounds like Carnegie, or was it the Emperor William? . . . Pardon me, that is another formula. We are all trustees, of course.”

Brainard paused and then resumed in a different tone:

“I have been over this matter with Miss Walters and explained my position. I think she understands it quite well. If she can produce proof that she was legally married to the late Herbert Krutzmacht—”

“You would not be as crude as that!” Hollinger exclaimed, opening his eyes. “You know as well as the next man how purely accidental marriage is—the ceremony I mean. The law fastens on that of course—it has to have some nail to cling to—”

“As I told Miss Walters, the trouble with her, and I am afraid with you, too, Hollinger, is that you can’t comprehend an honest man. I happen to be a mere honest man.”

“Pray, don’t believe I doubted it.”

“Just plain, old-fashioned, vulgar honest,” Brainard continued irascibly. “Neither of you seem to understand that simple fact. You proceed on two false assumptions,—first that I am a crook and second that I am a coward—I might add a third, that I am a fool. So long as these false assumptions remain embedded in your mind, we simply can’t do business together.”

He walked suggestively towards the door. Hollinger also rose, a little wearily, a bored look on his face, and chucked his cigar into the fireplace.

“I am sorry,” he said gently, “that we have succeeded in straining your sense of humor. . . . The trouble with you virtuous people is that you bristle so easily at the least touch. I should think that Virtue would be more self-satisfying to its practitioners. Now I don’t bristle because you assume that I am a petty blackmailer and am trying to get money for Miss Walters in order to share with her. That’s what you think—confess it!”

“It looks that way,” Brainard said.

“If it does, it doesn’t worry me in the least. I don’t waste our time trying to prove to you that I am Honest and Disinterested, that I came here to-night really out of friendly interest in you—to try with the aid of my equable temperament and clear intelligence to avoid the mistakes that are likely to occur when excessive desire meets excessive virtue. But I have failed. You two will have to make up your accounts alone—or with the vulgar assistance of the courts. Good luck to you. And good night!”

He extended one hand to Brainard and the other to Farson.

“I will give myself the pleasure of setting you down at your hotel,” he said to the actress, who was slowly and somewhat regretfully buttoning her fur coat.

When Farson and the actress had left the room, Brainard detained Hollinger and said contritely:

“I’m afraid I did suspect you of collusion with Miss Walters—I’m sorry, for I have always liked you.”

“It’s very natural. You yourself must know how hard it is in this world to be really disinterested without incurring unjust suspicions. However, that’s nothing!”

“The trouble is I can’t understand you—never did!”

“I’m afraid I can’t return the compliment. I flatter myself that I understand you thoroughly.”

“Do you remember that first time I met you—on the train, the Overland Limited, going to California? You were in your compartment reading Paradise Lost with the help of a dictionary.”

The fight-trust man blushed slightly, probably at the mention of the dictionary.

“You mean the occasion when that active young seeker for notoriety, the special district attorney of San Francisco, was trying to put me in state’s prison?”

“You were under bonds then, seventy-five thousand dollars of bonds. I remember how awed I was at the size of your bonds!”

“Yes, I recall the occasion now,” the prize ring magnate said with a pleasant smile. “I didn’t remember that was our first meeting—I meet so many people everywhere—nor that I happened to be making the acquaintance also of the famous puritan poet. . . . The trouble with you, my friend, if you will permit me to indulge in a last bit of advice, is that you are so terribly conventional in your judgments of character, in your expectations of what people are to be. That is a very common limitation. You expected to find in me a bloody and brutal bounder, smelling of whisky and dazzling with diamonds. Instead you found an intelligent gentleman, interested in literature and life. The prize ring, Mr. Brainard, is as much an arena of Art in its way as the popular theater to which you are devoting so much effort and such large sums of money. And I was engaged in it as a business, as I am now engaged in the theatrical business. A financier, even of the prize ring, is not obliged to dirty himself with vulgar contacts. That explains the lofty idealism of some of our most prominent citizens. You plan and dream from above—the degrading associations are left to others, as doubtless you have already learned in the management of your own properties. . . . Well, I must not keep Miss Walters waiting below. Good night, my foolish Idealist! Good luck and more wisdom to you before our next meeting.”They descended to the hall which they found empty. Farson was getting the actress a last cigarette. As they waited, Hollinger observed musingly:

“You doubtless know about the marriage laws in California?”

“No, I don’t.”

“They are extremely,—what shall I say? Lax—liberal. You see our people out there are so unconventional and accidental in their habit of life, that the courts are forced to take the most liberal view of these personal matters. And we are as a people chivalrous towards women—much more so than you are here. So the courts are inclined to decide the question of marriage largely on whether the woman ought to have been married, rather than on the mere fact of the ceremony. That accounts for the large number of posthumous wives and their claims that turn up after the death of a rich man on the Coast.”

“Am I to regard this as a threat?” Brainard inquired.

“Bless you, my dear boy, don’t be so sensitive! Advice, just impertinent, uncalled-for advice, which I am so fond of giving. I should have left all that to Miss Lorilla’s lawyers—they are the proper persons to expound the California statutes.”“You don’t believe for one instant that Miss Walters was really married to old Krutzmacht?” Hollinger shrugged his shoulders.

“Quien sabe? as the Mexicans say. I have no doubt she ought to have been.”

“That is a very different matter.”

Hollinger again shrugged his shoulders. In the pause that followed, Hollinger began to muse aloud softly, as if he were presenting a case to himself:

“Her life has been typical. Born on a dreary little ranch, educated for a few years in one of our national institutions for the stultifying of youth, then deserted by her worthless father and forced to do something for herself and her useless mother,—what is the answer to that? Chorus girl. Twelve dollars a week and mother to support as well as herself and no special talent or exceptional looks,—what is the answer to that? Man.”

“Whom the girl in her gratitude tried to sell out when he was in a tight place. No, I am afraid you can’t make out a very good case for charity!”

“Just what had Krutzmacht done for her? . . . Changed her job from a dubiously respectable one to an undoubtedly disreputable one—and made her work in his office besides. No, the balance is on her side of the ledger. . . . Now she has matured,—oh, very much matured; has no protector, and mother still to support as well as herself,—what is the answer to that?”

“If you put your claim on the ground of social service, pure and simple,” Brainard replied, “it might be considered, I suppose. But I don’t think Miss Walters would accept charity.”

“Charity—justice—prudence? What’s the use of finding the right name? In the last analysis they are all meaningless.”

“You forget they mean something to me.”

“She hungers for some of life’s goodies.” Hollinger resumed his musing, ignoring Brainard’s reply. “But comparatively little would satisfy her—a secure home somewhere in southern California for herself and that tough relic of a parent, a little income, enough to assure permanent idleness. Consider what a boon that would be to the stage in itself! Possibly matrimony later on, why not? . . . As Krutzmacht’s residuary—er, trustee,—that’s what you called it, I believe, you ought to provide decently for his emotional lapses. . . . I put it to you now as a Sentimentalist, Idealist, Lover of Great Ideas.”

“You would talk me into giving her everything I have,” Brainard laughed, “if I could only once bring myself to accept your point of view.”“And that is?”

“That life is merely a juggle of words.”

“Ah, you are too young. One cannot fight successfully against youth, even with ideas!”

Miss Walters appeared, followed by Farson, and the conversation was at an end. The actress looked at Brainard from beneath her flaring hat, and her eyes had an unpleasant luster in them. No, mere charity would not satisfy that “thirst for vengeance upon life!”

“Well, Mr. Wilkins,” she began with a heavy effort at irony, “it is always sad for old friends to part. But in this case we may hope to meet again before long.”

“I hope so!” Brainard replied politely. “Let me put you into the cab.”

Hollinger followed them slowly down the steps. At the very door of the cab he lingered.

“In that brief visit which you made to the Coast did you ever come across a rattler in operation? No! It makes a slight, but perfectly clear noise first by way of warning—and then it strikes! Some women resemble the rattler. Look out for the sting!”

“Thanks! I shall.”

“Oh!” the prize ring magnate sighed in farewell, “my poor Idealist, what a lot of useless trouble you make for yourself and others!”

XII

Brainard carefully put out all the lights on the lower floor and then mounted the stairs to the room above. There he found Farson smoking a cigarette before the open fire and staring straight before him, as if his mind was occupied with a novel set of ideas. At sight of Brainard a curious smile crossed his face, and he looked interrogatively at his employer.

“Well?” he murmured.

“They are a pretty pair of—I was going to say crooks. But I don’t think my friend Hollinger is exactly that—I hope not.”

“He used to have the reputation of being the squarest man in his profession—the very soul of honor in the fight business. That was what gave him his prestige with the politicians, until the district attorney got after him.”

“I can’t make him out!”

“It’s not hard to make her out,” Farson commented.

“Her methods are only too obvious!”

“Did I ever tell you just what happened that evening in San Francisco after I saw you off on the ferry with your bag?”

“The last I saw of you,” Brainard replied, “you were on the run to the telephone booth to get your beat about me and Krutzmacht to your paper!”

“Well, after I ’phoned the story I streaked it back to Krutzmacht’s office. I fancied there might be something doing there after the woman got loose from the safe. There was! She had the marshal’s office and the police department—I don’t know but the fire brigade too—all up there buzzing, and she was trying to raise Crane,—you know the big railroad gun on the other side? She’d kept that telephone working ever since Peters threw the combination. If you had seen the temper she was in, you might have left her in that safe somewhat longer to cool off.... She seems to have quieted down a good deal. But I could see signs of her old temper this evening. I don’t believe adversity has improved it materially.”

“Probably not!” Brainard remarked, yawning and looking at his watch. “Three o’clock! Our friends made the time pass quickly.”

Farson did not move from his position before the dying fire. The late hour made no impression upon him, and Brainard did not seem anxious to get to bed.“What are you going to do?” the young man asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing!” Farson exclaimed in surprise. “You don’t mean to say—”

“I will let Lorilla make the next move—it’s up to her.”

“You won’t take Hollinger’s hint?”

“Buy her off? It would take too much, if we began that game. Besides, why should I?”

The young man was evidently puzzled.

“The only thing she can do,” Brainard explained, “is to produce a wife or heirs to Krutzmacht. I don’t believe she can do that successfully. If she does, I am quite ready to resign without a fight. But,” he repeated musingly, “I don’t believe she can prove that she was his wife.”

“There would be harder things to prove,” the secretary ventured, “especially in a California court!”

Brainard smiled. He knew that Farson thought him a fool to run the risk of a law suit and possibly failure in exposing fraudulent claims to the property that he held on such slight legal authority.

“I believe I never told you the whole story,” he said. “You probably think, if you think about it at all—just as Hollinger thinks—that I am a lucky and none-too-scrupulous adventurer, who had a fortune dropped into his hands by a peculiar accident and have enjoyed its possession undisturbed by any claimants up to this moment. But it isn’t quite like that. And there’s rather more drama in the true story of Krutzmacht’s fortune than anything we have yet offered at the People’s Theater!”

He took another cigar, remade the fire, and told Farson all the details of his hunt for the vague Melody ever since he had first found positive indications of her existence in the deserted house above Monument.

“Latterly,” he concluded, “Melody has grown somewhat dim in my mind. Perhaps the theater has taken her place as reality and as mistress; for I have always thought of myself as doing it with her money! But to-night when that woman turned up here with her vulgar, brazen air and tried to hold me up in a blackmailing way, something made me feel that Melody is still alive, in spite of all the chances that she isn’t, and that she will turn up in time to get her own.”

“She will have to appear soon!” Farson exclaimed.

“I felt in talking to Lorilla that she was perfectly conscious she has no legal right to the money—knew all along that Krutzmacht was married and had an heir or had made a will—”“Did you ever get hold of that trunk, the one I checked for you to Chicago when you were telephoning Krutzmacht’s office to inquire about Lorilla’s health?”

“It had disappeared before I was able to claim it. I suppose it went in the unclaimed baggage sale.”

“Never—it was too soon. She’s got it!”

“I don’t believe there was anything in it except some ledgers and letter files that might interest the railroad people.”

“A will?”

“Perhaps. But I doubt it. She would have used it before this!”

The secretary seemed more concerned over the situation than did Brainard. The latter said musingly as he dropped his cigar into the ashes:

“Of course, if there is no Melody, or if I can’t find her, which amounts to the same thing, that woman might as well have the money as anybody else. At least, a reasonable amount. Krutzmacht probably owed her liberal compensation.... But I shan’t give up my belief in Melody until the courts compel me to!”

“You don’t mean that you would let that Walters woman have the money?” the younger man demanded in astonishment.“Farson, you don’t understand. I suppose it seems absurd to you—it does to me at times. But I have never for one moment considered myself the owner of Krutzmacht’s millions—never! I suppose that has given me my freedom of action, my feeling that I could do things like this theater,—not for myself. In my own mind I was always acting for some one else. It may be all imagination, but if it is, Melody just as an idea has helped me tremendously,—to keep my hands clear, not to be corrupted by the large sums of money at my disposal,—to make a man of me! It’s a mighty helpful thing to be in the position of trustee to some unknown person. It might solve some of our hardest economic problems if more of our wealth was held on the same terms. I can’t explain it all, but it makes you free really not to have a cent of your own!”

Farson murmured something that sounded like the term which Hollinger had twice used, by way of contempt, in describing Brainard.

“No, I can’t understand!” he sighed.

“Well, you’d better get to bed,” Brainard laughed. “There’s nothing to worry about. That’s one happy result of my attitude. If it will make you feel any more sure of my sanity, I will see my lawyers in the morning. They are not likely to take sentimental views, I can tell you. I have been too profitable a client!”

After Farson had taken the hint and removed his bewildered person from the room, Brainard sat for another hour before the dead fire, in a sleepless revery. The unexpected visit of the stenographer and the fight-trust man had brought back vividly a long train of memories of what had constituted his active life for the last four years. The situation that had developed had again emphasized the dream quality of all living. It is the conventionally expected in life that makes what men ordinarily term reality. A slight turn from the ordinary course of events produces a sense of unreality. For four years there had come to Brainard, turn after turn, utterly unexpected and unforeseen, each one producing this sense of the essential unreality of life. But behind it all had grown the living reality of his own will and character that had been formed by meeting and dealing with the exigencies of each situation fairly according to the laws of his nature.

As he had said to his secretary, the result was that he found himself now ready to abandon his adventurous position upon demand without a sense of overwhelming loss and disaster. He had no more feeling of enmity or of contempt for Lorilla Walters than Hollinger evinced. She was playing her little part in the complex scheme of destiny, playing it vulgarly and crudely, and he suspected improperly. But what occupied his thoughts at this crisis, much more than the possible machinations the actress might be able to set on foot against him or the instability of his own fortunes, was the woman’s situation. What Hollinger had said for her in plea of extenuation had touched him more deeply than he had let the fight-trust man see. It was perfectly true that she should be provided for out of Krutzmacht’s loot in life. He tried to think how this could be brought about without compromising himself or his elusive mistress’s rights. He resolved on the morrow to see not only his lawyers but Hollinger also, and contrive some plan by which the ex-stenographer could obtain justice without gratifying her spite.

“But she is not the old man’s heir—of that I am sure!” he said to himself as at last he sought his bed. “And Melody lives—I stick to that! The dream will hold to the end, not go to pieces in any vulgar fashion like this!”

XIII

The perfectly correct New York lawyers to whom Brainard told his tale later that morning evinced no surprise. There was nothing in the heart or brain of man, they seemed to say, that could flutter a New York lawyer. “It would be advisable to find Miss Melody straightway,” they felt, and inquired what sort of title Brainard held to the Arizona mine. When he confessed that it was only a tax title, they remarked that under the Arizona laws any heirs of the dead German had a year more in which to redeem the property. That did not trouble Brainard. The lawyers very strongly urged their client not to make advances to Miss Walters or to her friend and manager on her behalf. That would be suicidal, they averred, opening the way at once to endless blackmail and even criminal prosecution. “Let the matter rest until the interested parties make some move,” they advised, in a perfectly cautious and obvious way.

“I’ve done my best to find the heirs, as you people very well know. I’m convinced there’s only one, and I’m not sure that she has any legal claim. But hers was the only name the old man mentioned the one time I saw him.”

“You certainly made a mistake in not getting hold of that trunk!”

“After my settlement in Paris with the bankers,” Brainard explained, “I felt that it was of the first importance to go to Monument as soon as possible; and by the time I turned up at the Chicago railroad station, the trunk had disappeared.”

“If no heir can be found, there is not much danger of trouble; but if they should happen to get hold of this girl you call Melody, it might be awkward.”

“I should be only too glad if she could be found, by them or any one else!” Brainard exclaimed with sincerity. “I could then wash my hands of the whole matter.”

The lawyer looked at him uncomprehendingly, then resumed:

“Assuming that no heir of the old man is forthcoming, the only harm that these persons could do you would be to stir up the attorney-general to take action to recover the lands for the Territory. They would have to move quickly to get their action before the courts, and the proper representations at Washington would discourage any such litigation.”“That doesn’t worry me. But that woman! She’s perfectly capable of becoming Krutzmacht’s widow and providing a whole brood of children.”

“You mean fraudulent?”

“Or left-handed,” Brainard suggested. “I believe she’s training them now!”

“We shall have to wait until she produces them in court, then,” his counsel remarked with a grin.

As the weeks and then the months slipped by without any sign from Krutzmacht’s former stenographer Brainard almost forgot the midnight visit that she and the fight-trust magnate had made and the disturbing conversation which had taken place. During this summer the People’s Company played a short season in Chicago, and were so cordially received in that city, which seemed to be more open-minded in theatrical matters than New York, that Brainard felt he had made a mistake in not starting his dramatic enterprise in this thoroughly American community. An opportunity offering of securing the lease of a new theater in Chicago, Brainard decided to take it and support a second company in the West to interchange with the parent company. He placed MacNaughton in charge of the new company, having found a younger and more adaptable man to work with him in New York. All these arrangements took much time and thought and involved many trips between the two cities to complete the negotiations. Brainard had the satisfaction of knowing that if they had failed in their first season to make the impression he had hoped, at least they had shown courage and determination. The Idea was far from dead,—was growing slowly and adapting itself, as all large Ideas must, to the environment and the conditions. . . .

One morning, the day after his return from one of these hurried journeys to Chicago, Brainard found Farson immersed as usual in the folds of a newspaper over his coffee. Instead of the customary greeting, the secretary handed over the paper with the simple remark:

“She’s struck!”

A front page story of the usual type, emanating from the Pacific Coast, related that a woman claiming to be Krutzmacht’s lawful widow, married to him several years before in a small southern California town, was about to institute legal proceedings to recover the remnants of the dead promoter’s scattered fortune. At the time of Krutzmacht’s death, so the story ran, it was supposed that his large fortune had been completely swallowed up in his unsuccessful enterprises, but recently through a series of extraordinary events a very considerable amount of unsuspected assets had been discovered, to which the widow now laid claim. Eminent counsel had been retained in the case, and sensational developments were promised, involving a capitalist well known in New York and Arizona.

As Brainard having finished the story laid the newspaper down with a slight smile, Farson observed:

“So it’s on!”

“Apparently. . . . It took her some time to get into action. I suppose she was collecting her properties.”

“She’ll produce a son in court lisping ‘Pap Krutz,’” the secretary growled. He could not forgive Brainard for what he called his “weak” manner of handling the affair.

“Now we shall have an opportunity of seeing what sort of story she can put up,” Brainard remarked, proceeding unconcernedly with his breakfast. “Perhaps this action, through the notoriety it will give to Krutzmacht’s affairs, will serve to produce the real heir,” he added hopefully.

But after a visit to his lawyers Brainard was less optimistic. They pointed out to him that undoubtedly the first legal move would be to tie up the great Melody mine by an injunction. Whether the so-called widow could prove her marriage to the satisfaction of the court or not, the mine must remain idle. And the case might drag on for a couple of years or more, depending upon the resources the widow could command. During all this time there would be no income from the property; instead it would greatly deteriorate. The lawyers’ prediction was quickly fulfilled. Brainard found himself without the large monthly income from the flow of the sulfur wells, with an expensive law suit on his hands, and two greedy theatrical companies to be provided for.

“As Hollinger warned me, Lorilla is a Rattler,” Brainard said to the secretary when the two went over the situation. “It looks very much, my boy, as if this law suit would be the final curtain for the great Idea. I’m tied up short. The Chicago theater has taken a lump of money. I don’t believe I could lay my hands on fifty thousand dollars cash, all told.”

“I wonder where she is getting her money to fight the case,” Farson said.

“Perhaps Hollinger is putting it up—as a promising speculation!”

“You don’t think he would do that?”

“Why not? It goes with his philosophy. He gave me my chance to compromise—”“If you’d only taken it!”

“And when he saw that I wouldn’t compromise, he might decide to play on the other side. It makes little difference, anyway. If Miss Walters has any sort of claim, she can easily get all the money she needs. There are always ‘eminent counsel’ ready to take that kind of case on a good contingent fee.”

“Well, what will you do now?” Farson asked in a depressed tone.

“First I must get rid of the lease of the Chicago theater.”

“It’s too bad—the Chicago theater opened well. Mac thinks it will almost make expenses.”

“What Mac thinks and what the public thinks we have found to be two different propositions,” Brainard replied. “I don’t believe Chicago will miss us much. But I hate to close the New York theater.”

“Will you have to do that?”

“You know the figures—they don’t improve!”

“I suppose that dishes my play.”

Farson had been hard at work during the summer on a play of American life, based largely on material that Louisiana Delacourt had contributed in a series of amusing confidences about her own experiences, before her departure to complete her education in Europe. It was to be called Her Great Adventure, and had been coming on very fast latterly. The plan between the two friends had been to try it out toward the close of the present season, and, if the play proved successful, to open with it in the fall.

“I hadn’t thought about your play,” Brainard exclaimed sympathetically. “We must keep the house open until we can produce Her Great Adventure. There’s money enough in the bank for that.” He patted his secretary affectionately on the back. “But finish it, my boy, as soon as you can. That place eats money, and when the news leaks we shan’t be able to keep our company together long. Can you be ready by the first of March?”

“It will have to be ready! It’s awfully good of you, Brainard; and the play might possibly make money, you know.”

“If that happens, it will break all records for the People’s. We will give it every chance, anyway. How shall we cast it? Will Clara Dudley do for the girl?”

Forgetting all about Krutzmacht’s new widow and their financial predicament they began to discuss the cast for Her Great Adventure. The leading character was a young woman who had come fearlessly and pennilessly out of the great West, to find a career in New York. Brainard remarked suddenly:

“The woman to play that part is Louisiana herself.” Farson, for some reason, did not welcome the suggestion strongly. He preferred to take his chances with a more experienced actress. “Where is Louisiana, by the way? You haven’t given me any news of her for some time,” Brainard asked.

Farson blushed slightly as he replied:

“She’s in London just now—having a great time, I judge from the number of dashes and exclamations scattered over her letters. Characteristic style, you know. She hasn’t taken down much of the original bunting she carried.”

“She wouldn’t!” Brainard exclaimed with a laugh. “Louisiana is a genius. Don’t tell her what’s going to happen over here. Let her have her little dance out as long as it is possible. Her hard times, poor child, will begin soon enough!”

“She writes that Cissie Pyce is over there. Remember Cissie—our first experiment as emotional lady?”

“She wept all over this carpet when I fired her—do I remember?”

“Louisiana says that Cissie has been taken up by Bantam, and is coming back to the States to play in The Star of the Seven Seas.”

“We’ll make somebody’s fortune yet,” Brainard commented, “by discharging ’em, if in no other way. But Louisiana was really our first and only find—the one personality that we might have developed and produced.”

“And she found us!” the secretary corrected.

“Let’s see what it has cost all told.” He ran over on his fingers the different large items of expense that the great Idea had involved: “The theater building eight hundred, the first year in New York two hundred, Chicago . . . one million six hundred thousand odd for Louisiana!” Brainard concluded whimsically. “And she’s not yet launched. Our kind of art comes high, Ned!”

“You’re a tip-top loser,” the young man said admiringly. “Don’t you ever think what it will mean to you, if Lorilla should win her suit?”

Brainard stretched himself leisurely.

“Except for being licked in this theater business—and I don’t like being beaten any better than the next man—I should howl for joy when they produce the fictitious widow and the orphan son in court. It would set me free for another great adventure. That’s what Herbert Krutzmacht and Melody have done for one Edgar Brainard!”

In his eyes was the azure glitter of the sky above the stern Arizona mountains. For it was, indeed, a glorious world of venture for him whose soul was keyed to the right pitch.

XIV

Nevertheless, Brainard felt depressed as the time drew near when the doors of his theater would have to close, the windows be boarded up. Even should he win the case against the fraudulent claimants of the Melody, the great Idea could never be wholly perfected in all the splendid details that he had dreamed. No one man, were he Croesus incarnate, could create a national art. He had learned that. . . .

On the afternoon of the first rehearsal of Her Great Adventure, Brainard came early to the theater and waited in the library. It was a pleasant place, he reflected, as his eyes wandered over the empty room, with its polished marquetry floor richly covered with rugs, and the charming empire furniture, clocks, and ornaments that he had taken the pains to place there. He had tried to make these public rooms as clublike as possible, with ample lounging places, so that the theater might be something of a home for the players, as well as a workshop. Above the library was a glorified green room, where simple meals were to be had for a moderate price. All these details were part of the Idea, as he had seen it.

The People’s had a much better company this year, he reflected,—no great talent, but all fairly competent, and they worked together well. His enthusiasm and Farson’s had finally penetrated the ignorant and selfish surface of theatrical nature. Mac had been tactfully relegated to Chicago, and the promising young actor Leaventritt was fast making a place for himself as manager.

The company was really getting into shape. Ignored as they were by the critics and the “intelligent” public, or ridiculed for their efforts, the People’s Theater had won the allegiance of its players. They were developing a fine loyalty to the Idea, and a respect for themselves as members of an institution that had not been founded for profit. The week before, when Brainard had felt obliged to tell the company of his financial difficulties, and of the fate probably in store for the theater, there had been genuine, unselfish concern.

“Your salaries will be paid until the close of the season,” he told them; “and, in addition, each one will receive the percentage of his pension earned by his length of service. Unfortunately, there are no profits to share; but of course I have assumed all losses. And now I want you to do your utmost for our last play—this piece by Mr. Farson. Give it the very best you have in you. It is a strong play, an American play, the sort of play for us to produce. Let us end well!”

Then they had proceeded to the reading of the piece. Afterward, many of the company had come to him to express personally their honest disappointment at the enforced closing of the People’s Theater. They seemed to realize that their loss was more than that of salary.

“And we’ll make Her Great Adventure go!” they all said.

The spirit of the players had been comforting to the embarrassed patron.

“The People’s might have won out in time, with such a company—who knows?” he mused to the secretary.

“We may win out yet!” the young playwright answered, with a certain touch of vanity.

“I hope so, for your sake, I’m sure; but one play, no matter how successful, could not keep the Idea afloat.”

On the eve of failure, a new light had dawned in the enthusiastic mind of the founder. He realized that whatever one man tries to carry through alone, by brute force of will, without regard for the sympathy and the help of others, is destined to fail, especially where it is a matter of art that should appeal to the many. Not Mrs. Donnie Pearmain and her “upper classes” were needed, to be sure, but the People; and the People’s Theater had failed to touch the People. Very likely, Brainard mused, Lorilla was the hand of fate needed to prove this deeper truth to him. He had failed to find his vanished mistress, Melody, and with her inheritance he had tried to achieve the impossible. Now that inheritance might be taken altogether out of his control, and the great Idea vanish into the air from which his will had conjured it. . . .

A page brought Brainard a letter with a foreign postmark just as he was leaving the library for the theater. It was a hasty little scribble from Miss Delacourt—one of the few with which the young lady had favored him. In a hand that galloped unevenly over the paper, she informed him:

“I’m coming home—sail Saturday, on the Amerika, with Cissie Pyce. Best wishes!

“L. D.”

Brainard wondered what freak had possessed the youngster thus to cut short her lark, as he went to the telephone to inquire when the Amerika was due in New York. He determined to say nothing to Farson of the girl’s homecoming and to meet the young woman at the dock himself.There might, after all, be some method in her insanity—and there might be some good fortune in it for Farson and his play. For the little neurasthenic Miss Dudley, who, to the most casual eye, had evidently never been farther West than Hoboken, was hardly the ideal of adventurous American womanhood that the dramatist had drawn in his Gertrude. He would see Louisiana first, and make up his mind whether she was safe to try before speaking to Farson, whom he suspected of a more than friendly liking for the young woman.

When Brainard returned to the auditorium he found a stranger leaning over a rear seat, an unlighted cigar between his teeth, apparently interested in the lines of the new play that Leaventritt was going over with the company. As Brainard approached, the man turned his head; it was Hollinger.

“Hello!” he said, and nodding his head toward the stage asked, “New piece?”

For a few moments the two men listened to the halting lines from the stage, then Brainard asked coldly:

“Did you want to see me?”

Hollinger looked at him coolly, the merest smile on his curving lips.

“Yes,” he replied, “that is if you aren’t busy? I was in New York and thought I’d look you up.”

Brainard led the way to his private office, which was in the front of the theater behind the library.

“What is it?” he asked shortly, closing the door and standing above his visitor, who had seated himself and crossed his knees comfortably. Hollinger’s smile deepened to a grin.

“I suppose you have something to say to me,” Brainard added impatiently.

“Nothing in particular,” Hollinger replied. “I wanted to see you!”

“What for?”

“Well, to see how you take it for one thing.”

Brainard sat down in his chair more calmly and waited.

“Don’t you think you made a mistake?” Hollinger inquired.

“No!”

“You don’t mind the—er—row?”

“Not in the least.”

“You don’t want to stop it all before it’s too late?”

Brainard shook his head slowly.

“Not your way,” he said emphatically.

“I didn’t suppose you would,” the old fight-trust magnate sighed.

“You knew I wouldn’t!”“Sometimes your kind come to their senses—too late. I just thought I would sound you again before the case came to trial.”

“And save your money for counsel fees?” Brainard inquired suavely.

“Oh, that doesn’t trouble me,” Hollinger replied lightly. “You guessed that I was putting up the money? How clever of you!”

“But I can’t yet bring myself to believe that you mean to share with that woman in the profits of her perjury, if she succeeds.”

Hollinger smoked a few moments before replying.

“I don’t mind telling you that I have no intention of taking a cent from Miss Walters, or Mrs. Krutzmacht, as I suppose we ought to call the lady.”

“Then why do you go to all this trouble?”

“For various reasons, my dear young man. For the amusement I find in it for one thing. Can you understand that?”

“With some difficulty.”

“A sort of sporting interest in seeing whether she can win and carry off the bag, with the mine, from your hands, just as the other time I was immensely interested in seeing you escape from her hands at Jalapa. . . . She has a very pretty case, a very pretty case,” he mused. “The best legal talent have passed on it and found it quite flawless. It ought to go through without a hitch.”

“Unless the real heir should turn up meanwhile.”

“You still stick to that romantic fiction—that young man’s fancy?”

“You said that you had other reasons for helping Miss Walters?”

“One other reason: I felt that you had treated her—unsympathetically—oh, quite correctly from your puritan point of view; morally you are always above reproach, my young friend. But you are slightly inhuman. Your attitude that night when we discussed this matter at your house was both narrow and inhuman. It disgusted me, if you care to know frankly what I thought.”

“And in order to punish me for not following your advice you are conniving with this woman in the perpetration of fraud,” Brainard sneered.

“You use words rather crudely,” Hollinger replied in a mild tone. “I don’t understand ‘punish’ and ‘fraud’ in the way you do. You are determined to complicate a simple enough situation, and I am determined to give your virtue an all-round test. . . . Well, your mind is made up?”

“Absolutely!” Brainard exclaimed, rising to terminate the interview.“Perhaps you have your own widow and child?” Hollinger suggested with a laugh.

“Possibly!”

Then they went into the library, which the fight-trust man looked at with much interest.

“Would you like to see the house?” Brainard asked good-naturedly, always proud to show off his beloved theater.

“Above everything! I’ve read so much about it.”

Brainard conducted Hollinger over the building, explaining to him his purposes in making it more than a mere auditorium with a stage. Hollinger admired generously and intelligently all that he saw. As they came out at last in the darkened auditorium where the new play was still being read, he remarked to his host:

“I am very much obliged. It is all extremely interesting, a kind of kindergarten for the drama. Is this one of your products?” he nodded towards the stage.

“It’s Farson’s new play. We have high hopes for it!” Brainard said.

“Well, hurry up with it. I suppose you won’t be running theaters for amusement after—er—the event?”

“That remains to be seen!”

“If you find that you want to get rid of this place, let me know, will you?”“Thanks!”

“I might find a use for it. . . . I believe Miss Walters has ambitions to be a real star with her own theater. That is more chic these days than owning a copper mine, and she will need occupation.”

“So that was another of your reasons for this call?” Brainard suggested with a laugh.

Hollinger smiled.

“She might take you on as manager—how would that do?”

“I’ll discuss it with her personally, when the time comes!”

“I shall advise her to let you manage the mine instead!” Hollinger retorted, after listening to another of Farson’s rather flamboyant periods. “I think she and I have better notions of what the ‘People’ like.”

With a last smile he slowly sauntered towards the exit, where he paused long enough to catch a few more of the speeches in Her Great Adventure, which seemed to cause him unhappiness.

“Oh, Lord!” he murmured, and rushed for the door.

XV

As the big, pot-bellied steamship was being slowly pushed into her berth, Brainard, standing at the end of the pier, fancied that he could recognize two little figures on the upper deck. These feminine figures, rather eccentrically dressed, were evidently the knot of a laughing, joking circle of American men, all exhilarated by their approaching return to their beloved city. When the great black hull threw its shadow over the dock, one of the little figures waved both arms.

“That’s Louisiana, sure enough!” Brainard exclaimed, much relieved to know that the impulsive young woman had not abandoned her home-coming at the last moment from some fresh whim.

Ever since he had received her little note on the previous Monday, he had been astonished at himself. The prospect of seeing Louisiana again had often come into his mind with an agreeable sensation, hopping in without reason, as if sure of a welcome. This morning he had displayed a greater nervousness at breakfast than he had shown over the possible loss of the Melody mine, and had reached the dock an hour too early.

All this anxiety he explained to himself on the score of his desire to help on his secretary’s play. From the beginning Miss Dudley had shown such an inability to understand her part, and to cope with the character of Gertrude, that the young playwright was in despair. And yet Brainard’s interest in the maiden effort of his young secretary had not led him to confide the news of Louisiana’s unexpected return. He had been gratified indeed to learn that the young man did not suspect it.

Brainard wormed his way into the crowd at the foot of the gangway and waited impatiently while the thin stream of passengers filed down to the dock. The two actresses came together. Louisiana reached out a thin little arm to grasp Brainard’s hand with a ringing “Howdy!” before she gained the dock.

The European trip had made little surface change in the young woman. She was hugging to her a variety of flowers, several parcels, and a toy dog—a substitute for that shambling pup with which she used to appear at the People’s Theater.

“Thanks!” she bubbled, as Brainard relieved her of these impedimenta. “A lot of trucky rubbish I couldn’t jam into my trunk nohow, though I got a tub of a German steward to do the dead-weight act on the lid. You see, I started from London on the run for the steamer—didn’t have time to pack.”

She glanced furtively at Brainard, then down the long pier.

“This town looks good to me, even after Vienna and Paris. Yes, I’d like some real breakfast, thank you! You must have camped out here all night to turn up at such an hour. And how’s everything? How’s the—”

Her voluble stream suddenly ceased, and her gray eyes rested full on Brainard’s face, as if even in her heedless mood she hesitated to ask certain painful questions. Louisiana was very pretty and quite smartly dressed, as Brainard noticed, with a sense of satisfaction in the size of the letter of credit that he had replenished generously from time to time during the last year. Yes, in spite of her careless chatter, any one could see that Miss Delacourt was something of a person now.

Her companion joined them.

“You know Miss Pyce, of course,” Louisiana said. “Spell it with a y, please! We ran bump into each other in Piccadill last week. Cissie had engaged a deck stateroom all to herself, little swell, and that’s how I could get back on this boat.”

“But why did you come in such a hurry?” Brainard asked, when Miss Pyce was diverted to the inspection of her trunks. “I thought you were to stay over until the fall.”

Louisiana looked softly up out of her gray eyes. “But you see Cissie told me all about it!”

“Told you what?”

“That your mine had gone dry, or something, and the theater had to close, and you were in a hole generally.”

“But that wouldn’t have made any difference about you—at least at present. I told Farson not to write you of our troubles.”

“He didn’t. If it hadn’t been for Cissie, I shouldn’t have known a thing, though she said it was all in the papers. But I never read the papers over there.”

“I wish Cissie had kept her mouth shut!”

“She couldn’t, you know, if she had something nasty about the People’s to tell. But ain’t you the least bit glad to see me, after all my hustle to get here as quick as I could?”

“You know I am awfully glad!”

“Naturally I couldn’t stay over there, batting around, and you folks in trouble—just couldn’t have swallowed a mouthful of food!”

Brainard held out his hand.

“Thank you! That’s the nicest thing I have heard for many a day.”“Perhaps I could do something to help?”

“What?” Brainard asked jokingly. “Discover the real heir to the property?”

Miss Delacourt looked puzzled by this reference to his predicament. Evidently Miss Pyce’s information had been only of the most general character. The details of the threatened suit had not been considered of sufficient importance by the news agencies to cable to Europe.

“I can do something,” the girl said, drawing herself up haughtily. “I’m no stage-struck kid now. I’m going to act.”

“There is something you can do for me—for us,” Brainard hastened to say, remembering his chief excuse for meeting her at the dock. “I want you to come up to my house for breakfast right away, and hear what it is. Bring Miss Pyce, too, if she will come.”

“Oh, she’ll come! Cissie carries around a trunkful of floppy airs, but she’s a right good sort. I’m going to stay with her until I strike a job. She’s half promised to get me something in The Star of the Seven Seas—kitchen wench, I fancy. Cissie isn’t giving much away.”

“There’s something better than that ready for you. We want you to do the Gertrude in Ned’s play.”

“Is the People’s still open?” she cried in astonishment. “Cissie said it had gone dead broke, and was shut for good.”

“This is our last effort; and we want to go down waving the flag. It’s Farson’s play—”

“Yes, I know—he tried to put me in, but I bet he didn’t succeed.”

“It’s a good play, though! And Ned has slaved for the theater these last two years. We must do our best for him. Has he written you about the play?”

“Oh, yes; I should say he had—lots.”

The calm, impersonal way in which she admitted her correspondence with the young secretary pleased Brainard unreasonably.

“He’ll be there for luncheon; so speak to your friend, and let’s be off.”

Miss Pyce condescended to accept the invitation to breakfast from the proprietor of the People’s Theater, as she had nothing better to do with her time. Her own manager had wounded her vanity by not appearing at the dock with an automobile. So the three were soon tucked into Brainard’s motor and crossing the ferry. Miss Pyce inquired after the fate of the People’s company in a tone of lofty kindness, until Louisiana kicked her about the ankles, causing her to relapse into a sulky gloom.

“The salubrious air of Broadway will do you good, I hope, Cissie,” Louisiana remarked severely. “I’ve stood your nonsense for six days because I had to. Now come to, please! Just because you’ve got a fool play, and a fool manager to waste his money on you, you needn’t try the Duse-Bernhardt-Ellen Terry pose on old friends!”

Miss Pyce promptly descended several steps and began to converse about the New York weather, which she said was trying to English nerves.

When they arrived at Brainard’s house, they found that Farson had not yet come in from rehearsal. The two women were shown into the little den behind the library, while Brainard glanced over his mail.

Five minutes had scarcely elapsed when a shriek came from the inner room, and the door was thrown violently open. Louisiana stood on the threshold, clasping against her breast a little picture framed in a thin gold molding.

“Where did you get this?” she demanded breathlessly.

Brainard looked at her admiringly. As she stood there against the dark shadows of the inner room, the sun from the window falling in a great gold bar across her auburn hair and violet-colored traveling dress—thin, erect, full of the passionate eagerness of youth—he saw Farson’s character created.“Bravo, Gertrude!” he cried.

“Tell me, where did you find this?” she insisted impatiently.

“What have you got there?” he asked, taking the picture from her hands.

Her face followed his with curiosity and expectation, her eyes searching him.

“Where did you get it?” she repeated.

“This water color? I picked it up in Arizona—out there where my mine is located. It’s a long story—my story. I’ll tell it to you some of these days.”

“Now! Tell it to me now!” she insisted, with something more than childish impetuosity.

But just then Cissie Pyce, patting the marvelous folds of her hair, came from the inner room.

“Not now,” Brainard replied, looking meaningly at Miss Pyce.

Taking the water color from Louisiana’s reluctant hands, he replaced it above the desk in his private study, where it had always hung since he had moved into this house.

Farson came in presently, and in the flurry of his surprise and greetings the subject of the water color was apparently forgotten. Now and again, however, during their lively breakfast, Brainard found Louisiana’s gray eyes resting on him with a peculiar intentness. She did not seem so much excited over the prospect of playing Gertrude in Her Great Adventure as he had expected.

After the meal Cissie tore herself away reluctantly, and the three others went over the new play, the author explaining some of his ideas, and seeking to get the young actress interested in her part. Louisiana listened, but evidently her thoughts were far away. Farson was visibly disappointed.

“I think Miss Delacourt must be tired after her journey and the early landing,” Brainard interposed in kindly fashion.

“Of course—pardon me!” the young dramatist said, throwing down his manuscript. “Let me set you down at your hotel on the way to the theater.”

“No, you are already late for the rehearsal. I will take Miss Delacourt home when the motor comes back. I have something to say to her.”

Farson left with reluctance, after making an engagement for the morrow with the young actress.

“And I’ll know my lines by that time,” she promised him.

No sooner had the door closed upon the secretary than she leaped to her feet.

“Now for the story! And may I see the picture again?”Brainard fetched the little water color and placed it in her hands.

“As I told you,” he said, “it’s by way of being the story of my own life—at least, of the only part that counts as life!”

“Yes?” she said expectantly.

Looking over her shoulders, he pointed to a spot in the distant mountain background of the sketch.

“In there is the site of the great Melody mine—”

“Melody—what? Why, what do you mean?” the girl stammered in renewed excitement.

“The Melody mine—that’s the name of the mine about which there is the litigation, you know. That’s where all the money for the theater came from. It’s the famous pot of gold—my Aladdin’s lamp—only it’s likely to change owners.”

“But why did you call it Melody?” Louisiana demanded, with glistening eyes.

“That’s all in the story, too,” laughed Brainard.

“Then tell it to me—all!”

She dropped the picture into her lap, and, holding her little hands tightly clasped, fastened her eyes on Brainard’s face, as if what he had to say was of momentous interest to her. But that, he reflected, somewhat flattered, was just Louisiana’s way.

“Here goes, then, Miss Delacourt, for the story of my life, which explains that water-color sketch being in my possession!”

And Brainard retold the tale of his great adventure since he played the part of good Samaritan to the dying stranger. It took some time to tell the story, and he did not hurry. The motor came back and waited below, while he went into all the details of the story with which we are familiar.

At certain places Louisiana opened her lips, as if she could not control an exclamation; but when Brainard paused, she merely motioned him impatiently to continue. As he told of his dropping from the train at the lonely water tank, and of the strange little girl who had guided him to Gunnison’s shack, Louisiana’s mobile lips parted in a curious smile. She was not so much interested in his Mexican adventures, nor in the European chapters, but when he described his first visit to the deserted house on the hill above Monument, the girl’s face sobered to a wistful expression, and she caught her breath as if she might sob.

“And there I missed her by a few weeks!” Brainard said.

Louisiana laughed aloud, as if it were all a joke.

“It sounds,” Brainard remarked, having rapidly concluded the account of his experiences as a miner, “like a dime-novel yarn, but it happens to be all true. And throughout my adventures, all through these six years, I’ve clung to the idea of just being the trustee for this unknown lady—this Miss Melody Krutzmacht, or whatever her real name may be. I think that is what has saved me from becoming a plain gambler, and the whole business no better than the melodrama Farson and I saw, The Stolen Bonds, where we met my old friend Hollinger. I’ve got Melody to thank for saving my moral character, as well as doing a lot else for me. But I haven’t much hope now of finding the lady, to thank her for anything!”

“She ought to have something to thank you for, I should say!” Miss Delacourt exclaimed warmly.

“I’m afraid not. I really feel in my bones that those crooks will beat me out of the property, unless a miracle comes along. I’ve been a poor sort of steward while I had charge of the money. I put every cent I squeezed out of the bankers into developing the mine, and saved myself by a fluke with the sulfur wells. Then all the money they brought in I’ve sunk in this theater game, without much to show for it, as you know.”

“Didn’t you keep a few dollars for yourself?” Louisiana inquired with childish directness.

“Oh, there are a few thousands lying around—enough, young lady, to have kept you going in Europe another year, and to put on this play of Farson’s. That wipes the slate clean, and I must pawn these duds to stake myself!”

“Maybe this play will make money,” the actress suggested thoughtfully.

“That will be the miracle, then!” Brainard exclaimed whimsically. “It will be a greater miracle than the one that made me into a millionaire.”

“Don’t you believe in Mr. Farson’s play?”

“Of course! But I don’t believe in our luck, nor in the people’s taste in drama, as I once did.”

The girl sat staring at the little picture, clutching its frame with her hands. After a time she looked up into Brainard’s face with a winning expression about her small mouth.

“Will you give me this?”

Brainard hesitated.

“I would give you pretty much anything else I have,” he replied. “But, you see, that sketch is all I have of Melody—supposing it was hers! You understand?”

“You have a good deal of feeling for this Melody?”

“Yes,” Brainard admitted, slightly reddening, and added more lightly, “She’s been my benefactress, you see.”

The girl raised her gray eyes and looked steadfastly at him. Her face was older, Brainard suddenly perceived, than he had remembered it. Yes, the trip abroad had done much for the wild young girl.

“I want this!” she insisted.

“Then you shall have it!” Brainard exclaimed impulsively, and added with another blush, “It’s about all that I can give you!”

“I know it—and that’s why I want it so much!”

After that there was a conscious silence between them, until Miss Delacourt rose to leave. She walked slowly to the door, as if loath to go; then she turned and reached out both hands to Brainard. He took them, and they stood facing each other mutely.

For the first time in all these years his loyalty to his unknown mistress completely vanished. The ideal of Melody had faded from his mind.

XVI

If the young dramatist had been disappointed by Miss Delacourt’s apparent lack of interest in his play and in the part of Gertrude on the occasion of that first luncheon, he was quickly reassured by the energetic way in which, beginning with the next day, she threw herself into her work. As soon as she had time “to roll up her sleeves,” as she expressed it, she plunged into the rehearsals, an incarnation of work and enthusiasm.

To be sure, she put the author through some uncomfortable hours while she criticized his piece and suggested many important changes with her usual frankness and point. She “combed it out,” as she said, line by line, and convinced him, against his will, that he should cut freely and sharpen his dialogue all through. Moreover, she set him right on several subtle points in the heroine’s psychology.

“She knows what she’s about, too,” Farson reported to Brainard. “I don’t see how she’s done it, but in her flip way she’s absorbed a lot in Europe. She knows what all of them are doing. She was quoting Brieux, Barrie, and Shaw at me last night all in one gulp. I must rewrite that third curtain to suit her ladyship.”

“You must remember that you are dealing with a star,” Brainard observed dryly. “Louisiana may be new to the firmament, but she knows instinctively what belongs to her starship.”

In much the same manner the new leading lady took hold of the other players, and “shook ’em all by the neck and woke ’em up.” There were but three weeks left, and she wore the company almost to the point of revolt by the long rehearsals she demanded. When they grumbled, she read them a characteristic lecture.

“It’s your last stunt for the old People’s. You know you have all got a lot out of the concern—for one thing, better pay than some of you will ever see again; and much more besides. So show that you’ve got something warm inside your anatomy where your hearts ought to be—at least a dog’s gratitude for the hand that’s fed you. The piece is all right, too; it will make the jaded pulse of Broadway flutter like an ingÉnue. Just you give the public a chance to discover that here is a play as is a play!”

During these strenuous weeks of rehearsal Brainard was absent most of the time in Arizona and Washington, where the already celebrated case of the Krutzmacht widow was now imminent. He had come to believe that Farson had more than a professional interest in his Gertrude, and he preferred to be absent from the scene of the wooing; but on the day of the dress rehearsal of Her Great Adventure he returned to New York and dropped in at the theater on his way home, slipping into a seat in the rear of the dim house.

The piece went with amazing swiftness and smoothness, thanks to the hard work Miss Delacourt had got out of the company. Absorbed by the play, Brainard was completely taken out of the wearying round of his daily perplexities.

“It is a play,” he muttered excitedly to himself, “and they do it wonderfully well. That girl is almost great. If the public will only come to see her, and not believe what the newspapers say, they’ll understand. She’s an actress!”

He repeated these warm words of praise a little later in Miss Delacourt’s dressing room, where he went to congratulate the actress. Louisiana was in street costume, buttoning up her gloves, when he arrived.

“I saw you in the back row,” she said in reply. “Any better news?”

“I am afraid not. The first court reserved its decision. They put up an amazing case, the impudent rascals! They almost made me believe them in spite of myself. I must tell you all about it sometime. I think we shall be able to pull off Her Great Adventure just in time before the sheriff closes the doors.”

He laughed good-humoredly at the situation, and handed her his cigarette case. Louisiana lighted a cigarette, then said abruptly:

“I hope you won’t be angry with me. I’ve borrowed something of yours while you were away. Couldn’t wait to get permission.”

“Honored that you found anything worth taking! What is it?”

“I borrowed a new name for myself!”

“I remember you said that we had ruined the old one for you!” he laughed. “You were sitting over there in the corner, too mad to cry, when you said it.”

“After making such a guy of myself as Cordelia I couldn’t bear to see the old name on the billboards. Besides, I think I like this one better, anyway.”

“What is it?”

“I’m calling myself Melody—”

Brainard’s expression changed suddenly; and he turned away.

“You don’t like it,” she said coaxingly. “But it’s a pretty name!”

“Melody what?” he asked with a touch of sternness.“Oh, just Melody White—that’s all.”

“But Melody was her name,” he protested.

“I know! You told me so. But that Melody doesn’t exist really; she’s just a name—an idea you have. I took a fancy to it—my dotty point, see? I’m superstitious about it. I want to make this play a great big success, as you made the mine,” she said swiftly. “So don’t be cross with me for making free with your unknown lady love’s first name!”

Brainard smiled in spite of himself at the girl’s insistence on a trivial thing.

“I don’t know why I should object,” he said slowly.

But he realized that even in speaking he did object. It was one thing to ask him for Melody’s sketch, the only memento he had of his mistress, but another to take this liberty with the mythical Melody’s name, and to post it up for the whole world to see on a theatrical billboard. In a moment, however, Brainard’s common sense came back to him.

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t take that name as well as any other, if you can make it right with Farson and the manager. I should think they might object, after all the press work they have done for Louisiana Delacourt.”

“I can manage them all right!”The new Melody puffed these gentlemen aside in a cloud of smoke.

They drove uptown together in Brainard’s car, but neither spoke. The girl, Brainard observed, was unwontedly excited, her little hands gnawing at the muff in her lap, her keen eyes devouring the passing crowd on the streets. Brainard, who was tired in mind and body, was content merely to watch his companion from his corner through half-closed eyes.

After all the hard work of the past weeks, Louisiana—or, as she now preferred to call herself, Melody—was marvelously fresh and pretty. She had the lithe body, the deep-set eyes, the sensitive, mobile features of a real temperament. He wondered whether she cared deeply for Farson. The young secretary was undoubtedly attractive, and should this play bring him the attention it ought, he might become a good dramatist; but if the girl had an ambition to be a great actress, she had better not tie herself yet to any man. And it comforted Brainard curiously to remember how unmercifully she had handled the young man’s play.

“The Star of the Seven Seas is to be withdrawn,” she said at last, breaking in on his meditation. “Only two weeks’ run—dead failure! Cissie thinks New York audiences are exceedingly provincial. She is going back to dear old Lunnon as soon as she can get there. Maybe I shall be able to help her later.”

As the car stopped before a third-rate hotel in the Forties, Brainard inquired:

“So Cissie has moved from the Astor?”

“Yes, Cissie is visiting me now,” the actress replied.

“Times change—for us all!”

“They do that—sure—and for the better sometimes!” the young actress averred with a contented smile.

XVII

Latterly the critics had completely ignored the existence of the People’s Theater. Its announcements aroused no more public interest than the program of an ethical culture society. Brainard, who had at last learned the real importance of publicity, feared lest this same contemptuous indifference on the part of the press might bury his young secretary’s play in hasty and undeserved oblivion.

But as he sank into his seat on the following Monday night he was surprised and relieved at the size and the character of the audience. All the leading critics of the metropolitan press were there, also many of “those who know,” and whose verdict is useful indirectly. There were some theatrical people, and a few fashionable folk from Mrs. Donnie Pearmain’s world. The rest were of the ordinary, semi-intelligent theater-going sort.

It was an ideal house before which to try out the new piece. If the play had anything enduring in it, there were those present who could recognize the fact. Ned Farson had many personal friends in the city—college mates at various clubs, young literary aspirants, dramatists, newspaper and professional men. Among these, evidently, the word had been passed around that Ned’s play was to be produced—and that was enough. Louisiana had also worked Cissie, and Cissie Pyce had reached other professional circles.

“And now for the play,” Brainard sighed, dropping his glasses after this preliminary reconnaissance, “and for our one actress!”

At last, in the hush of a well-trained, expectant audience, the heavy curtains drew apart noiselessly, revealing the first scene—a rough shack in a mining camp, with a splendid background of mountains and desert.

There was no doubt from the first curtain that the piece would go—would hold this audience, any audience, by the simple power of its story, its honest pathos and humor, its vitality and veracity. But it was not until the first scene of the third act that the people gathered there awoke to the fact that a real actress, and one whose very name had not been heard before that night, was taking this piece, and the part of the Western girl, Gertrude, to present herself as an artist. “Melody White” was her name on the program.

“Who is she?” was the whisper that ran around the theater.Certainly she was not the Louisiana Delacourt whose liberties with Cordelia had made a farce of Lear! Quiet, almost subdued in her methods, with an extraordinary variety of power, she gave the lines—many of which had a real poetic quality—with a musical accent that swept over the ears of the audience like a soft, summer wave. Her face was lighted with a glow; her slightest gesture seemed to reveal something of the character—the free, fearless, capable woman of the great West.

As the play went on, hardened theatergoers looked at one another in wonder and joy. Here, beyond the shadow of doubt, was a fresh talent, as Brainard had predicted.

At the close of the act, after the furious applause, the flowers, and the curtain calls for company, actress, and author, there was a clamor behind the scenes for a speech from the founder. The company gathered about Brainard and insisted that he “must say something.”

“You talked to ’em when I was down, do you remember?” Melody remarked. “I think you ought to say a word now that I am up!”

So for the second and last time Brainard faced an audience in the People’s Theater, and the irrepressible young actress was the occasion for both his speeches. In a few rapid words he reviewed the purposes he had had in mind in opening the theater, two years before.

“We have made many mistakes, of course. Perhaps some of you may think that we have made more mistakes than anything else. We have learned a great deal; and first of all, that in our country there is no ‘people’—no one public. At least, they haven’t patronized their own theater! But I can’t think that we have altogether failed, after such a night as this.

“One of our desires was to produce truthful American plays of American life. Her Great Adventure is American to the core, and you seem to think it good. Another object was to discover and educate persons of unusual dramatic talent, to create artists and free them from the base compromises of the commercial stage. To-night you have witnessed the dÉbut of such a talent. Having given the world Her Great Adventure and Miss Melody White, who shall say that we have failed? . . .”

After the play, the company gathered in the library for supper, to celebrate their triumph. It was Brainard’s custom to give such a feast at every premiere, but to-night there was among the fifty or sixty guests an unaccustomed air of success and intoxication that bubbled into speeches and songs and kept them until long after midnight. At last, after dreary failures, contempt, and neglect, the People’s had achieved a real, big, popular success! The critics had scattered to tell all New York to go to the People’s Theater in West Twelfth Street, to see Her Great Adventure and a real American actress.

“We shan’t be closing right off, I reckon,” Miss White whispered across the table to Brainard.

“Not as soon as I expected!” he replied with a smile.

When the party finally broke up, he looked to see the successful author lead away his triumphant star; but, to his surprise, Farson went off with some young men, to finish his triumph with them at a club. Brainard questioned the actress with his eyes.

“Yes, you’ve got to take me home in your car! Cissie has left. Don’t you see that I have waited until all the women are gone, and now you are making me ask you for a ride outright?”

“I merely wished to efface myself before the hero of the occasion,” he replied joyfully.

“No need of such consideration. He’s left me to cab it up alone.”

“Have you already had the usual tiff between two collaborators?”

“Oh, no,” she drawled, as the car started with them. “Not at all! But you see, he wanted to push the contract.”“What do you mean?”

“Ned asked me yesterday to marry him. It would be a convenient arrangement, you know; he could write the plays and I make ’em famous!”

“Don’t put it that way!” Brainard protested quickly. “He’s the best of fellows, and I know that he cares for you.”

“It won’t hurt him, I reckon. Clever boy—my, how big his head will be after to-night, though!”

The young actress yawned, and snuggled under the fur robe.

“How about yours?”

“I’m just happy. You see, I was right. The play is going to be a great money-maker.”

“It certainly looks that way to-night That means that we shall be able to keep the theater open till the end of the season, and close with the band playing. For all of which we have to thank you!”

“And your clever secretary! Tell me, have you heard anything more about the case?”

“The lawyers telephoned me late this afternoon that the judge had given his decree—in their favor.”

Her hand stole across to his under the robe.

“Of course, we appeal,” Brainard went on; “but they’ve got a strong case. Fraud, of course, but we can’t prove it.”

“Why not? Tell me more about the case. I’ve been meaning to ask you all along; but this play has filled every corner of my little head. Now I can think of something else. Come on upstairs. I don’t feel the least bit sleepy, and you can tell me all about your case—why they won when it’s a fraud.”

“That’s simple enough,” Brainard began, when they had seated themselves in the actress’s tiny parlor. “This man Krutzmacht, it seems, had married his stenographer out there in San Francisco. At least, she’s got a perfectly good certificate.”

“But how could he have really married her, if he was already married?”

“You mean if he was already married to the lost Melody’s mother? But was he married to her mother? We can’t find any record of it. Nobody knows, unless we could find Melody herself, and I have given up all hope of that. Krutzmacht might have deceived her, too, you know.”

“Why, of course he was married to Melody’s mother—and wasn’t divorced, either!”

“What do you know of it?”

“Stupid!” she said gently, rising and putting her hands on his shoulders. “Can’t you see that—I am Melody—yes, the real Melody!”

“Louisiana—”

“Name of my mother’s State. I made up Delacourt for the stage. Louisiana Delacourt was to be my stage name but Cordelia spoiled it.”

She laughed at his astonishment.

“And you are Melody Krutzmacht?”

“Lord, no! Melody White. Krutzmacht wasn’t any father of mine, thank goodness!”

“And your mother?”

“Was Mrs. Della White—legally married to Herbert Krutzmacht in the American consulate at Guatemala City. He met mama down there, and married her, when I was a child, and adopted me, too. I’ve got everything necessary to prove what I say. So you just telegraph that judge to hold his horses and get ready to write another decree!”

“And they hadn’t been divorced?” Brainard pursued, bewildered.

“Not that! He was bad enough, gave mother a dreadful life, took her up to that desolate mining town in Arizona, and left her there. Poor ma! But he sent her money when he had any—even that last time when he was in New York—and always called her his wife. I have letters to show it.”“But you weren’t his child!” Brainard mused.

“Only by adoption; but I am my mother’s only living relative, and she died after him!”

“So, as the old man seems to have had no other living heirs to make claim, it is all your money!”

Melody shook her head smilingly.

“Not quite that! A good part of it must belong to my able trustee, who discovered the sulfur and made it pay. Dad Krutzmacht couldn’t have had very much to the good when he died. He wasn’t a nice sort of man, Dad Krutzmacht,” she added thoughtfully.

“Well, he left you a nice little fortune—something that should run into the millions. You will have to think more tenderly of the old fellow.”

“Ugh! How I hated him and Monument! That’s why I dropped his name. And just as soon as mother was gone, I fled.”

“In the night—rode down to the railroad. I remember it all. But tell me, where did you go then, and what happened to you? How did you escape the search I made for you all over the world?”

“That’s my story! I’ll tell it to you some day—how I dishwashed and cooked on a ranch for a living, peddled corsets, and worked in a factory—it’s a long yarn. Some of it is in the play; I told Ned the amusing things. But he has fixed it up a whole lot—I don’t know myself!”

“It must have been hard for a girl.”

“It was, but I am not sorry. It gave you a chance to work the mine, for one thing.”

There was a pause, and then Brainard rose to leave, saying:

“Well, Miss White—”

“Just plain Melody, please! I like the name—don’t you?”

“It means a good deal to me, as I told you.”

The girl blushed, remembering what Brainard had said about his unknown mistress, and drawled:

“But you didn’t like my taking it a little bit.”

“No,” Brainard admitted. “But I don’t mind now.”

“You oughtn’t to, really, seeing that it is my own name by baptism.”

They both laughed at this. Melody danced about the small room, woke up the new Boston bull, and made him dance with her. She was once more the child Brainard had first known at the opening of the theater.

“You’ll have to squelch that woman who’s trying to take poor mama’s place,” she remarked, in a pause.

“Of course I shall attend to that at once—and all other business until I can straighten out your property and hand it over to you clear of tangles.”

“What do you mean? Do you think I am going to take your old mine?” Melody fairly shouted. “It’s yours, yours, all yours! You won the first stake with your nerve, and you made the rest of it. And you’ll keep it, too, my friend—at least, most of it. Perhaps some day, when I get the fool-bug in my head, and want a company of my own, I’ll come around and call on you for a couple of hundred thousand.”

Brainard looked at the girl almost severely.

“All the property is yours, of course. Krutzmacht meant it so. Your name was the last word on his lips. I have been merely your guardian. It would be impossible for me to keep it now. You can see that it would be entirely different from what it has been while you were only a name to me.”

“I see what you are,” she replied slowly. “The honestest, most generous, most unselfish of men—and the foolishest! Come, let’s stop this swapping of compliments like a couple of children—‘You take it, George!’ ‘No, you take it, Edith!’ . . . So old Pap Krutz wanted me to have his money when he was dying! I suppose he thought to make it square for what he put mother and me through. He treated us like peons!”

Brainard laughed.

“You may think differently about your millions in the morning. We’ll wait till then. Good night, and double congratulations, Melody!” he said.

“Yes, we’d quite forgotten how good I was in the play. I’ll send you those papers about mother to-morrow morning, and you see that the scalawags don’t make good! I can’t be bothered with law suits and things until after the season closes. I’m making my great adventure now, the same as you did once! I don’t want to be disturbed until I have carried it through.”

“I’ll see that you are not disturbed. Before I go, please tell me why you didn’t let me know the truth when you found that picture in my room?”

“I had my idea,” Melody replied vaguely, her eyes shining into his. “I shouldn’t have given it away now—not until I had really made good—if it hadn’t been for that woman winning the law suit. When I discovered what the trouble was, I had to tell, of course.”

“I almost wish you hadn’t!” Brainard exclaimed, starting for the door.

“Why?”“I think you can tell why!”

And he was gone, leaving Melody with a thoughtful smile on her pretty face.

“I believe,” she remarked after a time, as in rapid, unstarlike haste she divested herself of her clothes, “that I shall find a way of compelling him to keep the money—somehow or other!”

XVIII

As he had promised, Brainard attended to the business affairs of Melody’s estate. The lawyers easily obtained a stay of proceedings and a retrial. With the proof of Krutzmacht’s real marriage to the mother of the young actress, the case dropped like a cracked egg, before it got to court. Hollinger and the counsel, who had been “staking” Miss Walters in her attempt, foresaw dangerous consequences and withdrew precipitately from the case. After the smoke had cleared away, Brainard did not forget the plea that Hollinger had made in behalf of Krutzmacht’s former stenographer. He resolved to use whatever influence he might have with the new heiress to secure for Lorilla Walters a modest crumb from the rich cake she had fought for that would make her independent for life and allow her to withdraw permanently from the stage. The last that Brainard heard of the versatile fight-trust magnate he was employed in the capacity of financial adviser to a Chinese prince, who had conceived the idea of developing a railroad in his province with the aid of Western capital. Hollinger, whose headquarters were generally in London, achieved a signal success in this kind of financial diplomacy for which his temperament and his morals both fitted him.

After the suit had been disposed of, Brainard amused himself by preparing an elaborate report of his trusteeship of the estate, in which everything was accounted for, to the original items he had spent on his first journey. He also put his own affairs in order, in preparation for that day at the close of the theatrical season when the young actress would deign to give her attention to business matters. She was too busy at present.

For the improbable had really happened. Her Great Adventure proved to be the one undoubted theatrical success of the past four seasons. That intelligent first-night audience had gone home and told its friends that they must not miss the new play at the queer theater in West Twelfth Street. They, in turn, had promptly told their friends, and the news had quickly become contagious. Instead of a two weeks’ run the house sold out until the end of June, and a road company was already being prepared to satisfy the curiosity of the provinces. Incredible fact! The People’s Theater was making money, even with its low scale of prices.

At the close of the fourth week, when the new manager came to see Brainard in regard to the next season, Brainard smiled at him in amusement.

“I’m out of the theater business, Leaventritt. The place isn’t mine any longer.”

“I saw that you had won your suit.”

“Yes, but the theater isn’t mine.”

“Sold out?” the manager asked, a disgusted look on his eager face.

“Not that, but I’m out of it, just the same. You’ll have to see Miss White about another season. Perhaps she can help you out.”

“And just when the blamed sucker had fallen into the mint, so to speak!” the manager complained to a subordinate. “So it’s up to Miss Melody White, is it? Well, that lady’s no sucker. I’ll have to show her good cause!”

The next day, as Brainard was superintending the dismantling of his rooms, word was brought to him that Miss White had called and wished to speak to him.

“Sure it isn’t Mr. Farson that Miss White wishes to see?” he asked the servant, thinking of the new play which Farson had begun for the actress.

“Sure it isn’t!” a laughing voice answered from the hall, and Melody pushed her head through the doorway. “You’re pulling out?” she asked in surprise, remarking the disheveled condition of the pleasant library. “Where to?”

“Don’t know yet—just stripping for action,” Brainard replied buoyantly. “You gather a lot of moss about you whenever you plant yourself.” He pointed to the books and pictures ranged along the walls, ready for the packing-cases. “And one sinks into the moss, too, so that it becomes hard to tear up,” he said less cheerfully.

Melody sat down on a lounge, crossed her knees, and slowly pulled off her long gloves, as if she had come to stay.

“My!” Brainard remarked, looking attentively at her clothes, “how dressy the lady is getting to be!”

“Marks of my position,” Melody replied, with elaborate indifference. “It makes Cissie’s eyes water when the things come home. It’s almost as good fun as telling her that I will try to save her a small part in the new play, or something in one of the road companies.”

“Haven’t you paid Cissie in full for all her airs? Or do you still get amusement out of teasing the poor thing?”

“One has to do something, you know,” Melody sighed.“The ennui of success has come so soon!” Brainard mocked. “You’ll be taking to ’citis and lap dogs. But I have a document that may distract your starship’s idle moments meanwhile, and give you something to think about.”

He stepped into the inner room and returned with a typed manuscript.

“Another play?” Melody inquired in a languid tone. “Have you taken to writing plays, too?”

“Not exactly,” Brainard replied, running over the sheets.

“Leaventritt came to see me yesterday,” Melody remarked carelessly.

“I sent him.”

“So he said.”

“You want to be careful. There’s a mercenary streak in his blood, and success is likely to bring it out; but he’s intelligent and honest enough.”

“You’re still set on making an idiot of yourself about the money and things?”

“If you mean that I am still determined to render unto Melody the riches that are Melody’s by rights, why, yes!”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“Any one of a number of things,” Brainard replied cheerfully. While Melody negligently turned over the pages of his elaborate report, he continued musingly: “It was just six years ago this month when my play was turned down—the last one I ever wrote. I walked back up the avenue with the manuscript in my pocket, feeling that the bottom of the world had dropped out. I was a forlorn, broken specimen. It was a day something like this, too.” He glanced at the lowering April sky. “It is very different now. I’m not much richer than I was then, but I am a totally different being. In fact, I think now I could call myself a man!”

“I think so,” Melody agreed, in a rather doleful voice.

“And a man can always face the world with a light heart, no matter how light his pockets happen to be.”

Melody nodded sympathetically, and murmured,—“for the great adventure!”

“Yes! Life is the great adventure!”

After a long silence, Melody looked up into Brainard’s face and stretched out her hands to him.

“Won’t you take me—with you—on the great adventure?”

Brainard grasped her hands, and, leaning forward, tried to read the full purpose in the gray eyes.

“Melody!”

“Must I ask twice?” she said, blushing. “It’s more than most women have the nerve to do once. You see, after you left that night, I guessed—and—”

As Brainard took her in his arms she threw back her head, and, holding him away, said:

“And you’ll have to take the Melody mine along with Melody. I said I’d make you keep the old thing!”

XIX

“And what shall we do with the theater?” Brainard asked, in a lucid interval, early in June. “Shall we sell it to Einstein & Flukeheimer for vaudeville? Or shall we keep it for a certain American actress when she wearies of matrimony? Or shall we try to put new life into the great Idea, and keep on giving the dear Public what bores it, because it’s good for the dear Public to be bored?”

“I never thought much of your great Idea,” Melody confessed candidly. “The trouble with it is that it doesn’t do any good to give people what they aren’t willing to work for. You’ve got to earn your bread, so to speak, in order to digest it properly. The Public’s got to want good plays and good acting enough to pay the proper price for ’em. You can’t get people interested in an art they don’t understand and don’t want enough to work for. Let ’em give themselves the best they can understand and like until they kick for better!”

“That even I have begun to comprehend, O Minerva and Melody in one! Still, there are exceptions to your philosophical principle—for example, yourself, goddess, and me, who digest with an excellent appetite our heaven-sent cake.”

“Didn’t you earn it—and me? As few men ever earned the love they take! And I reckon I earned you, too.”

There followed an unlucid interval.

“But what, then,” Brainard resumed, after the interval, “shall we do with one large, commodious theater building; also one great Idea with a hole punched in it, through which the gas has escaped?”

“I’ve been thinking of that problem, too. We might turn it into a coÖperative company, and let the players own it and run it to suit themselves.”

“Even into the ground?”

“Just that! But there are some good heads in the company, and it will give them all a chance. Besides, we can afford it, dear!”

“Yes, we can much better afford to give it away than to keep it running,” Brainard admitted. “As your husband, I can’t countenance all the follies I put on you as mere guardian!”

So the last night of the season, a warm June night, the People’s players got together at the close of the performance in the pleasant library of the theater, and Brainard and Melody made them two little speeches. First, Brainard explained to the players the plan of a coÖperative stock company, in which all members were to own shares, with a board of directors, of which Leaventritt was to be chairman and Farson secretary. Then Melody said:

“You heard the boss on the new plan. You’re in great luck, let me tell you! And you will be awful chumps if you fight among yourselves, or otherwise don’t make a go of it.” Melody looked severely at Cissie Pyce, who was seated obscurely in the rear of the room. “Of course, you’ll all think yourselves Coquelins and Sarahs. Well, you’re not. Mind what the manager says. You’ve got the prettiest, nicest theater in the city, a fair company, and a good start with Mr. Farson’s new play. I shan’t be with you next season. As you’ve doubtless heard, I’ve taken a new manager—for life—and we’re going abroad on our first tour. So buck up! Don’t fight! Good luck!”

And thus was formed the independent Company of Actors, with one Edgar Brainard as honorary president, and Mrs. Edgar Brainard, nÉe Melody White, as honorary vice president. All the company came to the wedding, and later trooped to the dock to see the couple depart for Europe.

A floral offering from the company—an elegant version of the great scene in Farson’s play, done in roses and carnations—filled their stateroom to the exclusion of much else. It was labeled, “Their Great Adventure.”

“That’s right,” Melody said when they went to inspect their quarters. “It’s life, not art!”

“We’ve made a fair start, don’t you think?” Brainard added.

Melody replied by raising her lips for the expected kiss.