“Of course! It was when you were laid up. I thought she’d lay down on me, because you wouldn’t see her that night. And then came the Chicago engagement. I took my mother along to look after her. I didn’t know she hadn’t told you anything for a time, and then I left it to her to do what she wanted to do. It was always her idea to take you by surprise. I think she cared more for that than for anything else. Great goodness, man, you don’t imagine _you’ve_ been treated badly?” Baron’s glance became inscrutable. “Why, just think of it!” Baggot went on. “She’s drawing the salary of a regular star. And her reputation is made.” Baron turned away almost curtly. What was to be gained by discussing Bonnie May with a creature who could only think of salary and reputation--to whom she was merely a puppet, skilled in repeating lines of some one else’s fashioning? He entered Thornburg’s office. His manner was decidedly lugubrious. The manager held out his hand expansively. “You’ve come to congratulate me,” he said. And then he took in Baron’s mood. “Oh, I see!” he went on. “There’s something that needs explaining. I played fair with you all right, Baron. You see, I was in the dark myself, in some ways.” He took occasion to light a cigar, which he puffed at absent-mindedly. “Just before Bonnie May showed up here--when you got hold of her--I learned that her mother had died. It had been kept from me. You see, I was sending the mother money. And when the little one was only a year or so old I got a letter from her mother offering to give her up to me. I’ve told you what happened then. I--I couldn’t take her. Then I got another letter from the mother saying she was turning Bonnie May over to her sister for the time being, and that I was to send the remittances to her. That was Miss Barry. “I believed the arrangement was only temporary. I didn’t understand it, of course. But when several years went by I began to suspect that something was wrong. I didn’t like Miss Barry. She was never the woman her sister was. She was--well, the brazen sort of woman. I wasn’t willing to leave the little daughter with her any longer. I wrote to her and told her she might send Bonnie May to me, if she cared to, but that there weren’t to be any more remittances. I thought that would fetch her. I meant to put the little daughter in a home or a school somewhere. And then they blew in here, and you got her--and your getting her was just the thing I wanted.” An incandescent light on the manager’s desk winked once and again. “The curtain’s going up,” he informed Baron, and the latter hurried back to his seat. As he entered the box a flood of cold air from the stage swept over the audience. And when his mother shivered slightly he observed that Peter Addis, sitting immediately behind her, quietly leaned forward and lifted a quilted satin wrap from a chair, placing it deftly about her shoulders.