e?' he demanded. 'None, sir,' I
stammered. 'I only wanted to look at the author of "The Rivals."' He
appeared much amused and said: 'Egad! So you are a patron of the
drama, my boy?' I muttered something in the affirmative. He regarded
my appearance critically. 'I presume you would not be averse to
genteel employment, my lad?' he asked. With that he scribbled a moment
and handed me a note to the property man of Drury Lane. My heart was
too full; I had no words to thank him. The tears were in my eyes,
which, noting, he remarked, with an assumption of sternness: 'Are you
sure, boy, you are not a bailiff in disguise?' At this I laughed and
he left me. The note procured me an engagement as errand boy at the
stage-door and later I rose to the dignity of scene-shifter. How truly
typical of this man's greatness, to help lift a homeless lad out of
the gutters of London town!

"But I am rambling on as though writing an autobiography, to be read
when I am gone--"

Here the entry ceases and the rest of the pages in the old date-book
are blank.

CHAPTER V

THE LAWYER'S TIDINGS

The sudden and tragic death of Constance's foster-father--which
occurred virtually as narrated by Straws--set a seal of profound
sadness on the heart of the young girl. "Good sir, adieu!" she had
said in the nunnery scene and the eternal parting had shortly
followed. Her affection for the old manager had been that of a loving
daughter; the grief she should have experienced over the passing of
the marquis was transferred to the memory of one who had been a father
through love's kinship. In the far-away past, standing at the bier of
her mother, the manager it was who had held her childish hand,
consoling her and sharing her affliction, and, in those distant but
unforgotten days of trouble, the young girl and the homeless old man
became all in all to each other.

Years had rolled by; the child that prattled by his side became the
stately girl, but the hand-clasp at that grave had never been
relinquished. She could not pretend to mourn the death of the marquis,
her own father; had he not ever been dead to her; as dead as the good
wife (or bad wife) of that nobleman; as dead as Gross George, and all
the other honored and dishonored figures of that misty past? But
Barnes' death was the abrupt severing of ties, strengthened by years
of tender association, and, when his last summons came, she felt
herself truly alone.

In an old cemetery, amid the