, now, when she
doubles over at the hips--who ever heard it out of Galway? She saves
her hand, too. She's at her best in the second act. She's really
MacConnell's poetic motif, you see; makes the whole thing a fairy tale."

The second act opened before Philly Doyle's underground still, with
Peggy and her battered donkey come in to smuggle a load of potheen
across the bog, and to bring Philly word of what was doing in the world
without, and of what was happening along the roadsides and ditches with
the first gleam of fine weather. Alexander, annoyed by Mainhall's sighs
and exclamations, watched her with keen, half-skeptical interest. As
Mainhall had said, she was the second act; the plot and feeling alike
depended upon her lightness of foot, her lightness of touch, upon the
shrewdness and deft fancifulness that played alternately, and sometimes
together, in her mirthful brown eyes. When she began to dance, by way of
showing the gossoons what she had seen in the fairy rings at night, the
house broke into a prolonged uproar. After her dance she withdrew from
the dialogue and retreated to the ditch wall back of Philly's burrow,
where she sat singing "The Rising of the Moon" and making a wreath of
primroses for her donkey.

When the act was over Alexander and Mainhall strolled out into the
corridor. They met a good many acquaintances; Mainhall, indeed, knew
almost every one, and he babbled on incontinently, screwing his small
head about over his high collar. Presently he hailed a tall, bearded
man, grim-browed and rather battered-looking, who had his opera cloak
on his arm and his hat in his hand, and who seemed to be on the point of
leaving the theatre.

"MacConnell, let me introduce Mr. Bartley Alexander. I say! It's going
famously to-night, Mac. And what an audience! You'll never do anything
like this again, mark me. A man writes to the top of his bent only
once."

The playwright gave Mainhall a curious look out of his deep-set faded
eyes and made a wry face. "And have I done anything so fool as that,
now?" he asked.

"That's what I was saying," Mainhall lounged a little nearer and dropped
into a tone even more conspicuously confidential. "And you'll never
bring Hilda out like this again. Dear me, Mac, the girl couldn't
possibly be better, you know."

MacConnell grunted. "She'll do well enough if she keeps her pace and
doesn't go off on us in the middle of the season, as she's more than
like to do."

He nodded c