ch Bebe was delivering with unction. "Audiences don't want to hear
smart babble after their seats are all down. They want to see the star
and get going. Cut in Miss Hawtry at the second set-to of Harriet and
aunt. Take it this way: 'And my dear Rosalind has said, Harriet--' Enter
Rosalind with the line you have there."

"Yes, it's time for me to get on and--" Miss Hawtry was agreeing
complacently, when she was quickly snapped off in her remark.

"Line, Miss Hawtry, not gab," Mr. Rooney commanded.

Instantly Miss Hawtry was reading from her lines and faithful Fido was
making annotations upon his manuscript with strokes that spelled
finality to the stricken author, who raised her protesting eyes to the
producer of her play.

"Steady now," Mr. Vandeford whispered. "This is the first reading, and
he's setting. We can't side-track him now. Later you can--" but the
author's attention was caught by the dialogue between Miss
Hawtry and Bebe, which was the first full dose of the Howard
fifteen-hundred-dollar, inebriate, but very brilliant and Hawtry-like,
"pep."

"Oh, I didn't write that at all!" she whispered, as she fairly shrank
against Mr. Vandeford's strength of mind, if not against the strength of
his arm that he had laid across the back of her chair.

"Just sit still and listen to-day as though it were somebody else's
play, and we will talk it over afterward. You know I--I warned you," he
whispered with soothing tenderness, his lips almost against her ear in
the dusk of the box.

"I promised, and I will," she answered him, and he was at a loss to
know if she really did flutter to him a fraction of an inch as he had
suspected her of doing in his car on the night of her debut on Broadway.
The charm of Kentucky girls is composed of many illusions and realities,
which they themselves hardly understand, and use by hereditary instinct.

And with her proud head poised in all stateliness, Miss Patricia Adair
sat for five solid hours and heard "The Purple Slipper," _nee_ "The
Renunciation of Rosalind," read from first to last page by the people
who were to present it to the public; and Mr. Vandeford found his heart
bleeding for the thrusts into hers. Not a protest did she make, but the
roses faded and the gray eyes sank far back behind their black defending
lashes, and they were glittering with suppressed tears as the wearied
company rose to its feet after the last line.

"Here to-morrow at eleven sharp," were Mr. Rooney