able hour, he could descreetly
find out. On another stage a bedroom likewise intrigued him, though this
was a squalid room in a tenement and the bed was a cheap thing sparsely
covered and in sad disorder. People were working on this set, and he
presently identified the play, for Muriel Mercer in a neat black dress
entered to bring comfort to the tenement dwellers. But this play, too,
had ceased to interest him. He knew that Vera Vanderpool had escaped the
blight of Broadway to choose the worthwhile, the true, the vital things
of life, and that was about all he now cared to know of the actual play.
This tenement bed had become for him its outstanding dramatic value. He
saw himself in it for a good night's rest, waking refreshed in plenty of
time to be dressed and out before the tenement people would need it. He
must surely learn if the big sliding doors to these stages were locked
overnight.

He loitered about the stages until late afternoon, with especial
attention to sleeping apartments. In one gripping drama he felt cheated.
The set showed the elaborately fitted establishment of a fashionable
modiste. Mannequins in wondrous gowns came through parted curtains
to parade before the shop's clientele, mostly composed of society
butterflies. One man hovered attentive about the most beautiful of
these, and whispered entertainingly as she scanned the gowns submitted
to her choice. He was a dissolute--looking man, although faultlessly
arrayed. His hair was thin, his eyes were cruel, and his face bespoke
self-indulgence.

The expert Merton Gill at once detected that the beautiful young woman
he whispered to would be one of those light--headed wives who care
more for fashionable dress than for the good name of their husbands.
He foresaw that the creature would be trapped into the power of this
villain by her love of finery, though he was sure that the end would
find her still a good woman. The mannequins finished their parade and
the throng of patrons broke up. The cameras were pushed to an adjoining
room where the French proprietor of the place figured at a desk. The
dissolute pleasure-seeker came back to question him. His errant fancy
had been caught by one of the mannequins--the most beautiful of them,
a blonde with a flowerlike face and a figure whose perfection had been
boldly attested by the gowns she had worn. The unprincipled proprietor
at once demanded from a severe-faced forewoman that this girl be sent
for, after wh