lock tea.

There was a scene in the performance in which the three girls sang
together, and Glory crept out to the head of the stairs to listen. When
she returned to the dressing-room her heart was bounding, and her eyes,
as she saw them in the glass, seemed to be leaping out of her head. It
was ridiculous! To think of all that fame, all that fuss about voices
like those, about singing like that, while she--if she could only get a
hearing!

But the cloud had chased the sunshine from her face in a moment, and she
was murmuring again, "O God, do not punish a vain, presumptuous
creature!"

All the same she felt happy and joyous, and on the third night she was
down at the theatre earlier than the other dressers, and was singing to
herself as she laid out the costumes, for her heart was beginning to be
light. Suddenly she became aware of some one standing at the open door.
It was an elderly man, with a bald head and an owlish face. He was the
stage manager; his name was Sefton.

"Go on, my girl," he said. "If you've got a voice like that, why don't
you let somebody hear it?"

Her plump ladyship arrived late that night, and her companions were
dressed and waiting when she swept into the room like a bat with
outstretched wings, crying: "Out o' the wy! Betty Bellman's coming! She's
lyte."

There were numerous little carpings, backbitings, and hypocrisies during
the evening, and they reached a climax when Betty said, "Lord Bobbie is
coming to-night, my dear." "Not if _I_ know it, my love," said the tall
lady. "We are goin' to supper at the Nell Gwynne Club, dearest."
"Surprised at ye, my darling." "_You_ are a nice one to preach, my pet!"

After that encounter two of their ladyships, who were kissing and hugging
on the stage, were no longer on speaking terms in the dressing-room, and
as soon as might be after the curtain had fallen, the tall lady and the
little one swept out of the place with mysterious asides about a "friend
being a friend," and "not staying there to see nothing done shabby."

"If she don't like she needn't, my dear," said the boycotted one, and
then she dismissed Glory for the night with a message to the friend who
would be waiting on the stage.

The atmosphere of the dressing-room had become oppressive and stifling
that night, and, notwithstanding the exaltation of her spirits since the
stage manager had spoken to her, Glory was sick and ashamed. The fires of
her ambition were struggling to burn un