novice, arrived at least an hour ahead of the earliest of her companions, she had beguiled the property man into painting on its lid that significant legend;—a task which the big unkempt fellow had performed to the tune of such glowing prophecies of days when her trunk should "go to the star dressing rooms in the toniest theaters," as had sent her into a seventh heaven of theatrical beatitude. In that hour she had forgotten the sordid details of her surroundings,—the whitewashed walls covered with scrawling penciled initials, burnt match marks, and torn red and yellow playbills,—had forgotten the flat, drab little towns of their route, the insistent drolleries of the Heavy Man, the depressing menus of flyspecked hostelries; forgotten even the long "jumps" that sent the company once a week stumbling down unlighted, unpaved streets to untimely train takings; forgotten everything, in fact, except the ardors and ambitions of this incongruous, topsy-turvy, yet passionately loved world behind the scenes.
"Ah—"
The sound came from lips that no longer curved scornfully. She shivered a little, that woman who knelt there in the afternoon sunlight, and brushed one hand across her forehead like one not sure of her own identity. It was all such worlds away from her life of to-day. And yet, once all those feelings had been hers,—and more:—the hard-worked-for promotion of the two years following, the dizzy delight of that night when a Chicago manager, visiting an Indiana river-port, had seen her play and had called her up higher to a position as leading lady in his new drama; the exultations and depressions of his months of tutelage; and then that Chicago first night, flowers, ovations, thunderous applause, the never-to-be-forgotten look of a thousand faces upturned to hers.
The woman's blue eyes were fixed now in a somnambulic stare; her lips parted, smiling, as little by little the search-light of memory illumined every detail of that performance, even to the opera cloak—a wonderful affair of sapphire-blue velvet lined with ermine—that she had worn in her great scene. The pivot of the play, her manager had called the garment, and indeed, what with being put on and off, laid across a chair-back in the
