, to comfort
myself? I pretended I was Edward Kean waiting in the passages at Drury
Lane, with all the other fine fellows looking down at the shabby little
gloomy man from the provinces. That was conceit for you, wasn't it?"

The pathos of this was, of course, irresistible to Esther, and Mike was
thereupon hugged and kissed as he expected.

"Never mind," he said, "you'll see if I don't make something of the poor
little part after all."

And, thereupon, he described what he laughingly called his "conception,"
and how he proposed to dress and make up, so vividly that it was evident
that the pastry-cook's boy was already to him a personality whose
actions and interests were by no means limited to his brief appearance
on the stage, but who, though accidentally he had but few words to speak
before the audience, was a very voluble and vital little person in
scenes where the audience did not follow him.

"Yes, you see I'll do something with it. The best of a small part,"
said Mike, speaking as one of experience, "is that it gives you plenty
of opportunity for making the audience wish there was more of it."

"From that point of view, you certainly couldn't have a finer part,"
laughed Esther.

Then for a moment Mike skipped out of the room, and presently knocked,
and, putting in a funny face, entered carrying a cushion with alacrity.

"That's a pie as is a pie, is that there pie!" he fooled, throwing the
cushion into Esther's lap, where presently his little red head found
its way too.

"How can you love such a silly little creature?" he said, looking up
into Esther's blue eyes.

"I don't know, I'm sure," said Esther; "but I do," and, bending down,
she kissed the wistful boy's face. Was it because Esther was in a way
his mother, as well as his sweetheart, that she seemed to do all
the kissing?

Thus was Mike's first part rehearsed and rewarded.

CHAPTER XIX

ON CERTAIN ADVANTAGES OF A BACKWATER

Though from a maritime point of view, Tyre was perhaps the chief centre
of conjunction for all the main streams of the world, from the point of
view of literature and any other art, it was an admitted backwater. Take
what art you pleased, Tyre was a dunce. Even to music, the most
persuasive of the arts, it was deaf. Surely, of all cities, it had not
been built to music. It possessed, indeed, one private-spirited
town-councillor, who insisted on presenting it with nude sculptures and
mysterious paintings which it f