me at last, in the second act. By God, it was
his own play!

"It was Pharazyn's play, superficially altered all through, nowhere
substantially; but the only play for me, when I knew that, was being
acted in the front row of the pit, and not on the stage, to which I had
turned the side of my head. I watched my old friend's face writhe and
work until it stiffened in a savage calm; and watching, I thought of the
'first night' he had pictured jovially in the old days, when the bare
idea of the piece was bursting his soul; and thinking, I wondered
whether it could add a drop to his bitterness to remember that too.

"Yet, through all my thoughts, I was listening, intently enough, now.
And in the third act I heard the very words my friend had written: they
had not meddled with his lines in the great scene which had moved us
both to tears long ago in my rooms. And this I swear to, whether you
believe it or no--that at the crisis of that scene, which was just as
Pharazyn made it, the calm ferocity transfiguring his face died away all
at once, and I saw it shining with the sweetest tears our eyes can
shed--the tears of an artist over his own work.

"And when the act was over he sat with his head on his hand for some
minutes, drinking in the applause, as I well knew; then he left his seat
and squeezed out on my side of the house, and I made sure he was coming
to speak to me over the barrier; and I got up to speak to him; but he
would not see me, but stood against the barrier with a mien as white and
set as chiselled marble.

"What followed on the first fall of the curtain I shall relate as
rapidly as it happened. Louder call for an author I never heard, and I
turned my eyes to the stage in my intense curiosity to see who would
come forward; for the piece had been brought out anonymously; and I
divined that Morrison himself was about to father it. And so he did; but
as the lie passed his lips, and in the interval before the applause--the
tiny interval between flash and peal--the lie was given him in a roar of
fury from my left; there fell a thud of feet at my side, and Pharazyn
was over the barrier and bolting down the gangway towards the stage. I
think he was near making a leap for the footlights and confronting
Morrison on his own boards; but the orchestra came between, and the
fiddlers rose in their places. Then he turned wildly to us pressmen, and
I will say he had our ear, if not that of the whole house besides, for
the f