"Yes, it's time for me to get on and--" Miss Hawtry was agreeing complacently, when she was quickly snapped off in her remark. "Line, Miss Hawtry, not gab," Mr. Rooney commanded. Instantly Miss Hawtry was reading from her lines and faithful Fido was making annotations upon his manuscript with strokes that spelled finality to the stricken author, who raised her protesting eyes to the producer of her play. "Steady now," Mr. Vandeford whispered. "This is the first reading, and he's setting. We can't side-track him now. Later you can--" but the author's attention was caught by the dialogue between Miss Hawtry and Bebe, which was the first full dose of the Howard fifteen-hundred-dollar, inebriate, but very brilliant and Hawtry-like, "pep." "Oh, I didn't write that at all!" she whispered, as she fairly shrank against Mr. Vandeford's strength of mind, if not against the strength of his arm that he had laid across the back of her chair. "Just sit still and listen to-day as though it were somebody else's play, and we will talk it over afterward. You know I--I warned you," he whispered with soothing tenderness, his lips almost against her ear in the dusk of the box. "I promised, and I will," she answered him, and he was at a loss to know if she really did flutter to him a fraction of an inch as he had suspected her of doing in his car on the night of her debut on Broadway. The charm of Kentucky girls is composed of many illusions and realities, which they themselves hardly understand, and use by hereditary instinct. And with her proud head poised in all stateliness, Miss Patricia Adair sat for five solid hours and heard "The Purple Slipper," _nee_ "The Renunciation of Rosalind," read from first to last page by the people who were to present it to the public; and Mr. Vandeford found his heart bleeding for the thrusts into hers. Not a protest did she make, but the roses faded and the gray eyes sank far back behind their black defending lashes, and they were glittering with suppressed tears as the wearied company rose to its feet after the last line. "Here to-morrow at eleven sharp," were Mr. Rooney's words of dismissal as he and Fido followed the company in their hurried exit toward the stage-door, with not so much as a glance at the box in which sat the stricken author. And there alone, off the dismal and dismantled stage in the cool dusk of the box, producer and author faced each other and the situation. "If my grandfather were not--not--dying, I'd take it right home and burn it all up!" were the first words the author of "The Purple Slipper" gave utterance to, after the last echo of the last footstep had died off the stage. "You couldn't, you've sold it to--to me," Mr. Vandeford answered with a coolness in his voice that restored her mental balance, as he had intended it should. "Now answer me truly; is it or is it not a good play?"