gement took a personal interest in you.
It was part of their job. Archie beamed absently and went in to lunch.
Lucille's empty seat stared at him mournfully, increasing his sense of
desolation.

He was half-way through his lunch, when the chair opposite ceased to
be vacant. Archie, transferring his gaze from the scenery outside the
window, perceived that his friend, George Benham, the playwright, had
materialised from nowhere and was now in his midst.

"Hallo!" he said.

George Benham was a grave young man whose spectacles gave him the look
of a mournful owl. He seemed to have something on his mind besides the
artistically straggling mop of black hair which swept down over his
brow. He sighed wearily, and ordered fish-pie.

"I thought I saw you come through the lobby just now," he said.

"Oh, was that you on the settee, talking to Miss Silverton?"

"She was talking to ME," said the playwright, moodily.

"What are you doing here?" asked Archie. He could have wished Mr. Benham
elsewhere, for he intruded on his gloom, but, the chappie being amongst
those present, it was only civil to talk to him. "I thought you were in
New York, watching the rehearsals of your jolly old drama."

"The rehearsals are hung up. And it looks as though there wasn't going
to be any drama. Good Lord!" cried George Benham, with honest warmth,
"with opportunities opening out before one on every side--with life
extending prizes to one with both hands--when you see coal-heavers
making fifty dollars a week and the fellows who clean out the sewers
going happy and singing about their work--why does a man deliberately
choose a job like writing plays? Job was the only man that ever lived
who was really qualified to write a play, and he would have found
it pretty tough going if his leading woman had been anyone like Vera
Silverton!"

Archie--and it was this fact, no doubt, which accounted for his
possession of such a large and varied circle of friends--was always
able to shelve his own troubles in order to listen to other people's
hard-luck stories.

"Tell me all, laddie," he said. "Release the film! Has she walked out on
you?"

"Left us flat! How did you hear about it? Oh, she told you, of course?"

Archie hastened to try to dispel the idea that he was on any such terms
of intimacy with Miss Silverton.

"No, no! My wife said she thought it must be something of that nature or
order when we saw her come in to breakfast. I mean to say," said