I got that way. Yes, I have nine motor cars, and I just bought a lace
tablecloth for twelve hundred bones--"

She broke off inconsequently, poor victim of her constitutional
frivolity. The director grinned after her as she danced away, though
Merton Gill had considered her levity in the worst of taste. Then her
eye caught him as he stood modestly back of the working electricians and
she danced forward again in his direction. He would have liked to evade
her but saw that he could not do this gracefully.

She greeted him with an impudent grin. "Why, hello, trouper! As I live,
the actin' Kid!" She held out a hand to him and he could not well refuse
it. He would have preferred to "up-stage" her once more, as she had
phrased it in her low jargon, but he was cornered. Her grip of his hand
quite astonished him with its vigour.

"Well, how's everything with you? Everything jake?" He tried for a show
of easy confidence. "Oh, yes, yes, indeed, everything is."

"Well, that's good, Kid." But she was now without the grin, and was
running a practised eye over what might have been called his production.
The hat was jaunty enough, truly a hat of the successful, but all below
that, the not-too-fresh collar, the somewhat rumpled coat, the trousers
crying for an iron despite their nightly compression beneath their
slumbering owner, the shoes not too recently polished, and, more than
all, a certain hunted though still-defiant look in the young man's eyes,
seemed to speak eloquently under the shrewd glance she bent on him.

"Say, listen here, Old-timer, remember I been trouping man and boy for
over forty year and it's hard to fool me--you working?"

He resented the persistent levity of manner, but was coerced by the
very apparent real kindness in her tone. "Well," he looked about the set
vaguely in his discomfort, "you see, right now I'm between pictures--you
know how it is."

Again she searched his eyes and spoke in a lower tone: "Well, all
right--but you needn't blush about it, Kid." The blush she detected
became more flagrant.

"Well, I--you see--" he began again, but he was saved from being
explicit by the call of an assistant director.

"Miss Montague. Miss Montague--where's that Flips girl--on the set,
please." She skipped lightly from him. When she returned a little later
to look for him he had gone.

He went to bed that night when darkness had made this practicable, and
under his blankets whiled away a couple of wakeful