, shrugged it from his
shoulders. He would not give up. They had all struggled and sacrificed,
and why should he shrink from the common ordeal? But he wished the
Spanish girl hadn't talked about going back to her job. He regretted
not having stopped her with words of confident cheer that would have
stiffened his own resolution. He could see her far down the street, on
her way to the next lot, her narrow shoulders switching from light to
shadow as she trudged under the line of eucalyptus trees. He hoped she
wouldn't give up. No one should ever give up--least of all Merton Gill.

The days wore wearily on. He began to feel on his own face the tired
little smile of the woman in the casting office as she would look up
to shake her head, often from the telephone over which she was saying:
"Nothing to-day, dear. Sorry!" She didn't exactly feel that the
motion-picture business had gone on the rocks, but she knew it wasn't
picking up as it should. And ever and again she would have Merton Gill
assure her that he hadn't forgotten the home address, the town where
lived Gighampton or Gumwash or whoever it was that held the good old job
open for him. He had divined that it was a jest of some sort when she
warned him not to forget the address and he would patiently smile at
this, but he always put her right about the name of Gashwiler. Of course
it was a name any one might forget, though the woman always seemed to
make the most earnest effort to remember it.

Each day, after his brief chat with her in which he learned that there
would be nothing to-day, he would sit on the waiting-room bench or out
under the eucalyptus tree and consecrate himself anew to the art of the
perpendicular screen. And each day, as the little hoard was diminished
by even those slender repasts at the drug store, he ran his film of the
Gashwiler dining room in action.

From time to time he would see the Montague girl, alone or with her
mother, entering the casting office or perhaps issuing from the guarded
gate. He avoided her when possible. She persisted in behaving as if they
had been properly introduced and had known each other a long time. She
was too familiar, and her levity jarred upon his more serious mood. So
far as he could see, the girl had no screen future, though doubtless she
was her own worst enemy. If someone had only taught her to be serious,
her career might have been worth while. She had seemed not wholly
negligible in the salmon-pink dancin