earing about the splendid
price Sam had got for the north-field rye. Then it was time for us to go
to bed, and I suppose it was best that it was too late for Mabel to come
into my room to tell me her version of Peter's troubles. For that one
night I sympathized fully with him. The next morning I was shown another
side of the question. And I felt decidedly different about Mr.
Farrington when he talked to me for a little while, alone before dinner
the next day, and after Judge Vandyne had also had me in solitary
conversation.

"You see, my dear young lady," said Mr. Farrington, with that twin-star
smile in his eyes I have mentioned, "the very wonderful nature that
grows and flowers such an exquisite young first play as this of our
young friend's, is the undoing of the work and the producer, unless he
is a heartless old brute like the one to whom you are at present
talking."

"Oh, I don't think you are that now, not at all. I--I think you are
wonderful, and I trust you with the play even though you haven't told me
anything about what you are doing to it," I exclaimed in great
confidence and enthusiasm.

"You are a wonderful bit lass yourself, and I trust you with my poet,
even if you haven't told me just what you are going to do with him," he
answered, and looked at me with the real affection, tempered with
amusement, that daddy and Judge Vandyne and Dr. Chubb all use toward me.

I blushed and was just going to tell him that--well, I don't know just
what I was going to tell him, but I am sure I'd have opened my innermost
heart to him, for that is what he invites, when in came Peter and the
rest, and we all went in to dinner. I didn't see the great dean of the
American stage alone any more, but he whispered to me just as Mabel and
Miss Greenough and I were leaving the room:

"Keep my poet easy, and you'll see what you see."

I am glad now when I look back on it that my presence did help Peter
through the ordeal of that two weeks. Also Mabel and I had schemes
together to take his mind off his dying child, which was being operated
on by Farrington to make it a success. The best diversion, however, was
Judge Vandyne's. He asked me to make out a list of ten of Peter's
Hayesboro friends, for whom he would send a private car over one of his
railroads, to bring them up for the first night of the play. That was to
be the 20th of September, and even then the bills were up all over New
York. I could see, from the way Judge Van