Suddenly in April came a telegram and a letter from Captain McWhirter at Kincade, to say that on the eve of production, his leading lady had run away to be married, and could I, would I, come down and see him through. The letter contained an enclosure for travelling expenses, and a substantial offer for my time. No reasonable objection presenting itself, I went down to him by Monday's train. CHAPTER IV On the morning between the second and third performance of "The Spy," for McWhirter never let the people off with less than three if he could help it, as I was sitting in the dining room of the Hotel Metropole at Kincade, enjoying the sense of leisure a late breakfast afforded, I saw the captain making his way toward me through an archipelago of whitish island upon which the remains of innumerable breakfasts appeared to be cast away without hope of rescue from the languid waiters, steering as straight a course as was compatible with a conversation kept up over his shoulder with a man, who for a certain close-cropped, clean-shaven, ever-ready look, might have been bred for the priesthood and given it up for the newspaper business. It was a type and manner I was to know very well as the actor-manager, but as the first I had seen of that species, I failed to identify it. What I did remark was the odd mixture of condescension and importance which the captain managed to put into the fact of being caught in his company. He introduced him to me as Mr. O'Farrell, Mr. Shamus O'Farrell, as though there could be but one of him and that one fully accredited and explained. He defined him further--after some remarks on the performance of the evening before in a key which seemed to sustain the evidence of Mr. O'Farrell's name in favour of his nationality--as manager of the Shamrock Players Company, billed for the first of the week in Kincade. It turned out in the course of these remarks, which the captain delivered with a kind of proprietary air in us, that Mr. O'Farrell--he called himself The O'Farrell in his posters--had a proposition to make to me. He put it with an admirable mixture of compliment and depreciation, as though either was a sort of stopcock to meet a too reluctant modesty on my part or a too exorbitant demand for payment. I was afterward to know many variations of this singular blend, and to acquaint myself definitely how far it is safe to trust it in either direction before the stop was turned, but for the moment I was under the impression, as no doubt O'Farrell meant I should be, that a thing so perfectly asked for should not be refused.