f various sizes, and thronged, at this hour, with members getting up an
appetite for dinner by the shortest route. The large round table nearest
the door was preempted by a group of men he knew; some of them well,
some only casually, and he came up with the intention of dropping into
the one vacant chair. But just before the first of them caught a glimpse
of him, his ear picked up the phrase, "_The Girl Up-stairs_." And then a
lawyer named Gaylord looked up and recognized him. "Hello, Aldrich," he
said, and Rodney would have sworn that the flash of silence that
followed had a galvanic quality that wasn't given it merely by his own
imagination. The others began greeting him, urging him to sit down and
have a drink.

Rodney pulled in a long breath: "Didn't I hear some one talking about
_The Girl Up-stairs_?" he asked. "Is it a good show? Shall I go to see
it?"

The silence was even briefer this time.

Gaylord spoke through what would pass for a yawn. "I don't know," he
said. "I haven't seen it."

One or two of the others shook their heads blankly. Finally somebody
else said: "Just a regular Globe show, I guess. All right; but hardly
worth bothering about."

Once more they urged him to sit down and have a drink, but he said he
was looking for somebody and walked away down the room and out the
farther door.

He knew now that he was afraid. Yet the thing he was afraid of refused
to come out into the open, where he could see it and know what it was.
He still believed that he didn't know what it was, when he walked past
the framed photographs in the lobby of the theater without looking at
them and stopped at the box-office to exchange his seat, well down in
front, for one near the back of the theater.

But when the sextette made their first entrance upon the stage, he knew
that he had known for a good many hours.

He never stirred from his seat during either of the intermissions. But
along in the third act, he got up and went out.

I doubt if ever a troglodytic ancestor of his had been as angry as
Rodney was at that moment. Because, long before the pressure of the
troglodyte's anger had mounted to the pressure of Rodney's, it would
have relieved itself in action. He'd have descended on the scene,
beating down any of the onlookers who might be fools enough to try to
oppose his purpose, seized his woman and carried her off to his cave.
Which is precisely and literally what Rodney, with every aching filament
of nerve