s Beach and young Craig, which really got queerer the
more one thought about it. It was hard to conceive of any allusion in
the plot or the songs of a silly little musical comedy, pointed enough
to account for Miss Beach's frantically determined effort to keep him
away, or for the instantaneous flush that had leaped into young Craig's
face. Because, after all, they didn't actually know that his great
adventure had come to grief, and whatever either of them might have
thought of the applicability of something that was said on the stage, to
their employer's ease, it wouldn't have been a bit like either of them
to discuss it with the other. In the absence of such a discussion, and
the prevision of his going to the show, you couldn't account for young
Craig's having caught the point instantly like that. And yet, what other
explanation could there be? There was none, and there was an end of it!

Only it wasn't the end of it. The straying search-light of his memory
picked up a moment during that last evening at the Williamsons'. The
Crawfords had been there, and somebody else--a man he didn't know; and
the stranger had said something, a harmless stupid remark enough, about
the tired business man and the sort of musical-comedy he liked;
whereupon both Constance and Violet had made a sort of concerted swoop
and changed the subject almost violently. John Williamson made a
practise of going to the Globe, he knew, but that John, who never
spotted an allusion in his life, should have come home and passed the
word along, and that all references to musical-comedy should therefore
be taboo on Rodney's account, was simply fantastic.

But the fantasticality of an idea seemed, in his mood to-night, merely
to give it the burr-like quality of sticking in his mind, holding on
there with a hundred tiny barbs, despite his endeavors to pluck it out.
It even occurred to him that the manner of the man at the cigar
counter--the man he had just told to get him a ticket, had not been
quite natural; had been a little exaggeratedly matter-of-fact. He always
got his seats of that man, and the man always made some little
encouraging remark, as, for example, that he'd heard it was a good show;
or, more non-committally, that he hoped Mr. Aldrich would enjoy it.
To-night, certainly, he'd said nothing of the sort.

The absurdity of this consideration was simply intolerable. He flung
down his paper and went into the adjoining room--a room full of tables
o