t
immediately, for, remembering suddenly that Roland Trevis had assured
him that no musical production, except one of those elaborate
girl-shows with a chorus of ninety, could possibly cost more than
fifteen thousand dollars at an outside figure, he began to think about
Roland Trevis, and continued to think about him until the train pulled
into the Pennsylvania Station.

For a week or more the stricken financier confined himself mostly to
his rooms, where he sat smoking cigarettes, gazing at Japanese prints,
and trying not to think about "props" and "rehl." Then, gradually, the
almost maternal yearning to see his brain-child once more, which can
never be wholly crushed out of a young dramatist, returned to
him--faintly at first, then getting stronger by degrees till it could
no longer be resisted. Otis Pilkington, having instructed his Japanese
valet to pack a few simple necessaries in a suit-case, took a cab to
the Grand Central Station and caught an afternoon train for Rochester,
where his recollection of the route planned for the tour told him "The
Rose of America" would now be playing.

Looking into his club on the way, to cash a cheque, the first person
he encountered was Freddie Rooke.

"Good gracious!" said Otis Pilkington. "What are you doing here?"

Freddie looked up dully from his reading. The abrupt stoppage of his
professional career--his life-work, one might almost say--had left
Freddie at a very loose end; and so hollow did the world seem to him
at the moment, so uniformly futile all its so-called allurements,
that, to pass the time, he had just been trying to read the _National
Geographic Magazine_.

"Hullo!" he said. "Well, might as well be here as anywhere, what?" he
replied to the other's question.

"But why aren't you playing?"

"They sacked me! They've changed my part to a bally Scotchman! Well, I
mean to say, I couldn't play a bally Scotchman!"

Mr. Pilkington groaned in spirit. Of all the characters in his musical
fantasy on which he prided himself, that of Lord Finchley was his pet.
And he had been burked, murdered, blotted out, in order to make room
for a bally Scotchman.

"The character's called 'The McWhustle of McWhustle' now!" said
Freddie sombrely.

The McWhustle of McWhustle! Mr. Pilkington almost abandoned his trip
to Rochester on receiving this devastating piece of information.

"He comes on in Act One in kilts!"

"In kilts! At Mrs. Stuyvesant van Dyke's garden-party! On L