hirty.

"I don't believe Mr. Belasco will be down this early, Jarvis," Bambi
said.

"Well, he is a busy man. He'll probably get an early start. I want to be
on the ground when he arrives, anyhow. If he should want me to read the
play this morning, we should need time."

She made no more objections. She straightened his tie, and brushed his
coat, with shining eyes, full of excitement.

"Just think! In five hours we may know." He took up his hat and his
manuscript.

"Yes," he answered confidently. "Shall we lunch here?"

"Yes, and do hurry back, Jarvis."

At the door he remembered her.

"Where are you going? Do you want to come?"

"No. I have something to attend to myself. Good luck."

She held out her hand to him. He held it a second, looking at it as if
it was a specimen of something hitherto unknown.

"I am not forgetting that you are giving me this chance," he said, and
left abruptly.

Bambi leaped about the rooms in a series of joy-leaps that would have
shamed Mordkin, before she began the serious business of the day.

Jarvis had carefully looked up the exact location of the Belasco
Theatre. He decided to walk uptown, in order to arrange his thoughts,
and to make up his mind just how much and what he would say to Mr.
Belasco. The stir, the people, the noise and the roar were unseen,
unheard. He strolled along, towering above the crowd, a blond young
Achilles, with many an admiring eye turned in his wake.

None of the perquisites of success, so dear to Bambi's dreams, appealed
to him. He saw himself, like John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness,
which was the world, and all the people, in all the cities, were roused
out of their lethargy and dull submission at his call--not to prayer,
but to thought. It was a great mission he was upon, and even Broadway
became consecrated ground. He walked far beyond the cross street of the
theatre in his absorption, so it was exactly half-after nine when he
arrived at the box office.

"I want to speak to Mr. Belasco," he said to the man there.

"Three flights up."

"Is there an elevator?"

"Naw."

He resented the man's grin, but he made no reply. He began to climb the
long flights of dark stairs. Arrived at the top, the doors were all
locked, so he was forced to descend again to the box office.

"There is nobody up there," he said.

"You didn't expect anybody to be there at this hour of the dawn, did
you?"

"What time does Mr. Belasco usually come?"