"Rooney sent me word that the lighting is doubtful. This rotten little theater is hard to count on for any kind of unusual lighting, and we must have that diffusion for the dinner scene so as to make the candle effect seem real," Mr. Vandeford was saying with great animation to Miss Adair and with a total lack of sentiment under the same young moon that had baffled him Friday night out in Westchester. "The whole thing seems a confused jumble to me," admitted Miss Adair. "I feel as if I couldn't wait until to-morrow night to really see the play with the costumes and scenery and love scenes and all in the right place. And yet I'm so tired I feel as if I could sleep a week." "I'll shake you if you go dead on me here as you did the other night in the car," threatened Mr. Vandeford, with a laugh, but he adjusted his shoulder back of hers as if he considered the danger entirely real. "I'll certainly do it if you don't take me back where I belong, wherever it is," threatened Miss Adair. "I hope Mildred isn't as--as tired as I am and--and can help me. I'll go to bed with my clothes on if she doesn't," Miss Adair gasped between yawns, and fluttered to Mr. Vandeford with a frank intention of gaining support. "Back to the hotel, boy, and go a good pace. Double tip," commanded Mr. Vandeford to their propelling Italian youth, with an alarm which puzzled him as much as it would have puzzled many of his friends, while he accorded his exhausted author the amount of support needed for the occasion--and no more. And as Mr. Rooney had hoped, the entire cast of "The Purple Slipper" slept into the afternoon of the dress-rehearsal day in the complete collapse which the sea air induced, and they were in a good condition for restringing. In fact, some of them began that process for themselves by an afternoon plunge in the ocean. One of those plunges had an after-effect on the fate of "The Purple Slipper" further than keying up Mr. Gerald Height for his dress rehearsals. When he discovered, while detaining Miss Adair for a chat after his late luncheon, that the author had never beheld the sea before in all her inland existence, and had never been in it, he insisted on procuring a bathing-suit and initiating her into that sport. She assented to the proposition with the greatest eagerness, and in less than half an hour she had trusted herself to the arms of Mr. Gerald Height and the Atlantic Ocean. They were both rough in their handling, and finally she came to resent the boldness of the former as much as she enjoyed that of the latter. With crimson in her cheeks and lightning in her eyes, she first attempted to drown them both, then waded to shore, sat down on the sand, and said things to Mr. Gerald Height, which had the magic effect of making him unburden himself and his lizard-like career to her in its entirety.