er,
they would have seen something very like the face of a corpse.

Luckily I am very short-sighted, and the space beyond the yellow glare
of the footlights was no more than a black and empty gulf to me. The
Penman, my miserable sin-steeped confederate, took me by the hand and
introduced me cordially to Mrs. Ralston. Until he had ceased to speak I
had no remotest idea of what I had to say; but the words came somehow,
and I half fancied that my old friend J---- G---- had spoken them.

There was a scattered round of applause at the end of the simple words I
had to speak; for some of my friends in front had recognised me, as they
might easily do, since I wore my own hair and beard. I did not think of
this, but wondered dimly that I should have begun to make an impression
so very early in the evening. I could see my breath rising like steam
against the darkness of the auditorium, for it was cold weather and
there was a touch of frost thus early even in the theatre. I sat and
talked in dumb-show with Lady Duns-combe, was fittingly snubbed by Lord
Dre-lincourt, and at length found myself alone with my confederate. The
scene before me I knew to be one of the strongest of its class in the
whole range of modern drama. I knew, impotent as I was, that I _could_
play it--I could feel the sense of power tingling through my own
impuissance. But the first essential was to know the words, and never
a word knew I. Luckily Jim the Penman was an old stager, had played the
part some two or three hundred times, and so knew most of the Baron's
lines.

Whilst we were having our dumb talk with Percival I had told him that
my head was as empty as a blown egg-shell, and had fairly frightened him
into taking care of me. He gave me my first words in a guarded whisper
at the close of every speech of his own, and shepherded me with
the utmost care through the whole scene. I shall never forget the
well-meaning feeble villain, stricken down by remorse and impending
terror, and the dominative Baron bullying him the while, with words
supplied piecemeal by the sufferer.

'And vot haf you to do vith shame?' inquired the Baron, and there stuck.
'Wife you cherish,' whispered the denounced one; and, thus primed, the
inexorable Baron resumed, and, having reached 'Wife you cherish,' stuck
again. 'Children you adore,' whispered Jim the Penman, gazing upward at
his tyrant with filmy eyes of suffering.

'And the children you adore,' echoed the Baron in a ton