for a
fortnight, though he was to have tried the play in Toronto at least a
week earlier. Then there came a telegram from Midland:

"_Tried play here last night. Went like wildfire.
Will write._
GODOLPHIN.

The message meant success, and the Maxwells walked the air. The
production of the piece was mentioned in the Associated Press despatches
to the Boston papers, and though Mrs. Maxwell studied these in vain for
some verbal corroboration of Godolphin's jubilant message, she did not
lose faith in it, nor allow her husband to do so. In fact, while they
waited for Godolphin's promised letter, they made use of their leisure
to count the chickens which had begun to hatch. The actor had agreed to
pay the author at the rate of five dollars an act for each performance
of the play, and as it was five acts long a simple feat of arithmetic
showed that the nightly gain from it would be twenty-five dollars, and
that if it ran every night and two afternoons, for matinees, the weekly
return from it would be two hundred dollars. Besides this, Godolphin had
once said, in a moment of high content with the piece, that if it went
as he expected it to go he would pay Maxwell over and above this
twenty-five dollars a performance five per cent. of the net receipts
whenever these passed one thousand dollars. His promise had not been put
in writing, and Maxwell had said at the time that he should be satisfied
with his five dollars an act, but he had told his wife of it, and they
had both agreed that Godolphin would keep it. They now took it into the
account in summing up their gains, and Mrs. Maxwell thought it
reasonable to figure at least twenty-five dollars more from it for each
time the play was given; but as this brought the weekly sum up to four
hundred dollars, she so far yielded to her husband as to scale the total
at three hundred dollars, though she said it was absurd to put it at any
such figure. She refused, at any rate, to estimate their earnings from
the season at less than fifteen thousand dollars. It was useless for
Maxwell to urge that Godolphin had other pieces in his repertory,
things that had made his reputation, and that he would naturally want to
give sometimes. She asked him whether Godolphin himself had not
voluntarily said that if the piece went as he expected he would play
nothing else as long as he lived, like Jefferson with Rip Van Winkle;
and here, she said, it had already, by his own show