ed last. But whenever I pled for a glimpse he would again
shake his head:

'The thing MUST be judged as a whole. Wait till I've come to the end of
the Fifth Act.'

So impatient did I become that, as the years went by, I used rather to
resent his presence at second nights. I felt he ought to be at his
desk. His, I used to tell him, was the only drama whose future ought
to concern him now. And in point of fact he had, I think, lost the true
spirit of the second-nighter, and came rather to be seen than to see.
He liked the knowledge that here and there in the auditorium, when he
entered it, some one would be saying 'Who is that?' and receiving the
answer 'Oh, don't you know? That's "Savonarola" Brown.' This sort of
thing, however, did not make him cease to be the modest, unaffected
fellow I had known. He always listened to the advice I used to offer
him, though inwardly he must have chafed at it. Myself a fidgety and
uninspired person, unable to begin a piece of writing before I know just
how it shall end, I had always been afraid that sooner or later Brown
would take some turning that led nowhither--would lose himself and come
to grief. This fear crept into my gladness when, one evening in the
spring of 1909, he told me he had finished the Fourth Act. Would he win
out safely through the Fifth?

He himself was looking rather glum; and, as we walked away from the
theatre, I said to him, 'I suppose you feel rather like Thackeray when
he'd "killed the Colonel": you've got to kill the Monk.'

'Not quite that,' he answered. 'But of course he'll die very soon now. A
couple of years or so. And it does seem rather sad. It's not merely that
he's so full of life. He has been becoming much more HUMAN lately. At
first I only respected him. Now I have a real affection for him.'

This was an interesting glimpse at last, but I turned from it to my
besetting fear.

'Haven't you,' I asked, 'any notion of HOW he is to die?'

Brown shook his head.

'But in a tragedy,' I insisted, 'the catastrophe MUST be led up to,
step by step. My dear Brown, the end of the hero MUST be logical and
rational.'

'I don't see that,' he said, as we crossed Piccadilly Circus. 'In actual
life it isn't so. What is there to prevent a motor-omnibus from knocking
me over and killing me at this moment?'

At that moment, by what has always seemed to me the strangest of
coincidences, and just the sort of thing that playwrights ought to
avoid, a motor-omnibu