remain
throughout the day at a safe distance from the door of the cafeteria. He
had proved the wisdom of this even the day before that had started with
a bounteous breakfast. To-day the aroma of cooked food occasionally
wafted from the cafeteria door would prove, he was sure, to be more than
he could bear.

He rather shunned the stages to-day, keeping more to himself. The
collar, he had to confess, was no longer, even to the casual eye, what
a successful screen-actor's collar should be. The sprouting beard
might still be misconstrued as the whim of a director sanctified
to realism--every day it was getting to look more like that--but no
director would have commanded the wearing of such a collar except in
actual work where it might have been a striking detail in the apparel of
an underworldling, one of those creatures who became the tools of
rich but unscrupulous roues who are bent upon the moral destruction of
beautiful young screen heroines. He knew it was now that sort of collar.
No use now in pretending that it had been worn yesterday for the first
time.

CHAPTER X. OF SHATTERED ILLUSIONS

The next morning he sat a long time in the genial sunlight watching
carpenters finish a scaffolding beside the pool that had once floated
logs to a sawmill. The scaffolding was a stout affair supporting an
immense tank that would, evidently for some occult reason important to
screen art, hold a great deal of water. The sawmill was gone; at one end
of the pool rode a small sail-boat with one mast, its canvas flapping
idly in a gentle breeze. Its deck was littered with rigging upon which
two men worked. They seemed to be getting things shipshape for a cruise.

When he had tired of this he started off toward the High Gear Dance
Hall. Something all day had been drawing him there against his will. He
hesitated to believe it was the Montague girl's kindly manner toward him
the day before, yet he could identify no other influence. Probably it
was that. Yet he didn't want to face her again, even if for a moment she
had quit trying to be funny, even if for a moment her eyes had searched
his quite earnestly, her broad, amiable face glowing with that sudden
friendly concern. It had been hard to withstand this yesterday; he had
been in actual danger of confiding to her that engagements of late were
not plentiful--something like that. And it would be harder to-day. Even
the collar would make it harder to resist the confidence that h