d ten minutes later, during a hurried dressing, he read the note
again, and said, aloud again:

"'Have breakfast'! I wonder if she had HERS?"

He entered the theatre so late, for all his hurry, that the first act
was over and the second well begun, and was barely in his seat before
the now familiar opening words of Mabel Vane's part fell clearly on the
silence of the darkened house.

For a moment Duncan thought, with a great pang of relief, that some one
else was filling his stepmother's place; but he recognized her in
another minute, in spite of rouge and powder and the piquant dress she
wore. His heart stirred with something like pride. She was beautiful in
her flowered hat and the caped coat that showed a foam of lacy frills
at the throat; and she was sure of herself, he realized in a moment,
and of her audience. She made a fresh and appealing figure of the
plucky little country bride, and the old lines fell with delicious
naturalness from her lips.

Duncan's heart hardly beat until the fall of the curtain; tears came to
his eyes; and when Margaret shared the applause of the house with the
gracious Peg, he found himself shaking with a violent nervous reaction.

He was still deeply stirred when he went behind the scenes after the
play. His stepmother presently came up from her dressing-room, dressed
in street clothes and anxious to hurry to the hospital and have news of
the little boy.

Duncan called a taxicab, for which she thanked him absently and with
worried eyes; and presently, with her and with the child's father, he
found himself speeding toward the hospital. It was a silent trip.
Margaret kept her ungloved fingers upon Penrose's hand, and said only a
cheerful word of encouragement now and then.

Duncan waited in the cab, when they went into the big building. She was
gone almost half an hour. Darkness came, and a sharp rain began to fall.

He was half drowsy when she suddenly ran down the long steps and jumped
in beside him. Her face was radiant, in spite of the signs of tears
about her eyes.

"He took the ether like a little soldier!" she said, as the motor-car
slowly wheeled up the wet street. "Mary held his hand all the while.
Everything went splendidly, and he came out of it at about four. Mary
sang him off to sleep, sitting beside him, and she's still there--he
hasn't stirred! Dr. Thorpe is more than well satisfied; he said the
little fellow had nerves of iron! And the other doctor isn't even goi