ting six to one against his getting off,
and a girl in gay clothes was waiting to speak to him. It was Aggie. She
had come to plead for Charlie.

"It's the drink, sir. 'E's a good boy when 'e's not drinking. But I ask
pardon for 'im; and if you would only not prosecute----"

John was ashamed of himself at sight of the girl's fidelity to her
unworthy lover.

"And you, my child--what about you?"

"Oh, I'm all right. What's broken can't be mended."

And meanwhile the church bells were ringing and the cabs were running to
the theatres.

XIV.

The rehearsals began early in the morning and usually lasted until late
in the afternoon. Glory found them wearisome, depressing, and often
humiliating. The body of the theatre was below the level of the street,
and in the daytime was little better than a vast vault. If she entered by
the front she stumbled against seats and saw the figures of men and women
silhouetted in the distance, and heard the echo of cavernous voices. If
by the back, she came upon the prompter's table set midway across the
stage, with a twin gas-bracket shooting up behind it like a geyser, and
an open space of some twenty feet by twenty in front whereon the
imaginary passions were to disport themselves at play.

Glory found real ones among them, and they were sometimes in hideous
earnest. Jealousy, envy, uncharitableness, and all the rancour of life
where the struggle for it is bitterest, attempts to take advantage of her
inexperience, to rob her of the best positions on the stage, to cut out
her lines which "scored"--these, with the weary waits, the half darkness,
the chill atmosphere, the void in front, with its seats in linen covers,
suggesting an audience of silent ghosts, and then the sense of the
bright, busy, bustling, rattling, real world above, sent her home day
after day with a headache, a heartache, and tears bubbling out of her
eyes.

And when she had conquered these conditions, or settled down to them, and
had made such progress with her part as to throw away her scrip, the old
horror of the woman she was to make herself into, came back as a new
terror. The visionary Gloria was very proud and vain and selfish, and
trampled everything under foot that she might possess the world and the
things of the world.

Meantime the real Gloria had a far different part to play. Every morning,
with a terrible reality at her heart, she glanced over the newspapers for
news of John Storm. She had n