the arms of Ursus, while two stage hands, lying prone, had plucked open the gate; and various happenings quite unsuspected of the audience had intervened, at least one of which had been a severe shock to the Puritan nature of John Hampstead.
However, there was the dramatic impression already referred to, and it ate its way like acid into the consciousness of at least one person in the playhouse.
Ursus, after looking about him for a moment in the little yard of the Christian's house to make sure he was entirely surrounded by friends, drew his fair burden closer and, as if by a protective instinct, bent over it with a look of tenderness so long and concentrated that his flaxen beard toyed with the white cheek, and his flaxen locks gleamed for a moment amid the raven ones.
"Well," commented Bessie, in a tone that mingled sharp annoyance with that judicially critical note which is the right of all high-school girls in their last year, "I do not see any dramatic necessity for prolonging this. Why doesn't he stick her face under the fountain there for a moment and then lay her on the grass?"
Mercifully, Bessie was not compelled to contain her annoyance too long. Ursus did eventually relinquish his hold upon the lady, and the piece moved on from scene to scene to the final holocaust of Rome.
With the news instinct breaking out above the critical, the dramatic columns of the morning papers gave the major stickful of type to the performance of that histrionic athlete, John Hampstead, forgetting to mention his connection with the Y. M. C. A., but making clear that in daylight he was a highly respected member of the staff of Robert Mitchell, the well-known railroad man.
But to John, the process of conversion from rate clerk to actor had been even more exciting than the demonstration of the fact proved to his friends.
