his
dreadfully shabby condition gave my heart a fresh cut.

"'Are you never going to spend that?' I asked in a whisper; and in a
whisper he answered:--

"'Never! It is all my play has brought me--all. It was given me as a
charity, but I took it as my earnings--my earnings for all the work and
waiting, and blood and tears, that one thing cost me. Spend it? Not I!
It will bury me as decently as I deserve.'

"We could converse no more. And the presence of other people prevented
me from giving him my overcoat, though I spoke of it into his ear,
begging and imploring him to come away and take it while there was still
time for him to clip back and get a seat in the front row. But he would
not hear of it, and the way he refused reminded me of his old stubborn
independence; all I got was a promise that he would have a bite with me
after the performance. And so I left him in the frosty dusk, ill-clad
and unkempt, with the new-lit lamp over the pit door shining down upon
the haggard mask that had once been the eager, memorable face of my
cleverest friend.

"I saw him next the moment I entered the theatre that evening, and I
nodded my head to him, which he rebuked with the slightest shake of his
own. So I looked no more at him before the play began, comprehending
that he desired me not to do so. The temptation, however, was too strong
to go on resisting, for while Pharazyn was in the very centre of the
front row in the pit, I was at one end of the last row of the stalls;
and I was very anxious about him, wanting to make sure that he was there
and not going to escape me again, and nervous of having him out of my
sight for five minutes together.

"Thus I know more about the gradual change which came over Pharazyn's
poor face, as scene followed scene, than of the developments and merits
of those scenes themselves. My mind was in any case running more on my
lost friend than on the piece; but it was not till near the end of the
first act that the growing oddity of his look first struck me.

"His eyebrows were raised; it was a look of incredulity chiefly; yet I
could see nothing to impale for improbability in the play as far as it
had gone. I was but lightly attending, for my own purposes, as you
youngsters skim your betters for review; but thus far the situation
struck me as at once feasible and promising. Also it seemed not a little
familiar to me; I could not say why, for watching Pharazyn's face. And
it was his face that told