Had he really seen lines of suffering at the corners of that smiling mouth? Had he imagined a look of distress in eyes which momentarily had met, but now evaded his? He was no sentimentalist. Yet he wondered. Vincent Seff, from a chair at the far right of the first row, looked entertained by his own entertainment. He sat slouched forward, knees crossed, elbow on them, chin in palm, eyes up-gazing. A flush was on his rather anaemic skin. Occasionally his cheeks twitched in an odd, carefully controlled smirk. He nodded, now and then, as if well pleased. John, glancing toward the shopman, saw the tip of his tongue appear and wipe both lips. About Seff, too, he wondered. From the wings, Mrs. Hutton watched all--the play, the “house,” the man who had conceived and perpetrated the coup and the newspaper reporters upon whom he depended to give it city-wide circulation. She, however, did not wonder about Seff. Only too well she understood why he was off guard at the moment, showing tendencies which, ordinarily, his policy would have concealed. She did not wonder, no. But she feared for him as much as, with a reaction that crushed the fear, she hotly, contemptuously resented him. As she studied the look fixed upon the girl whom he had chosen at first glance from a room full of attractive applicants, almost did she hate him. The chains of the hideous relationship which shackled together him and her seemed to clank as she turned from his unconscious pantomime to that which he had foreplanned. The playlet proceeded. The model trailed her bath robe to the door of the tiled room, there to throw it off and disappear within. Presumedly she plunged into her tub. At any rate, her next appearance, although fleeting, enhanced that impression. Just a glimpse of her was caught, as the maid pushed wider the door to supply a bath towel, but a glimpse that brought gasps from the audience sharp as though they, too, had taken a cold plunge. With hair twisted in a Grecian knot atop her head, she showed for the brief moment before the door was closed, garbed only in the flimsiest of silken undervests. By comparison she looked amply clad when, some seconds later, she reëntered the bedroom, stockinged, slippered and girdled, her outer garment a confection of the chemise persuasion which laid claim to modesty only in its blush hue. The length lack of this costume was remedied by the maid. After a chase whose obvious object was further to show the cut and texture of the display, the woman succeeded in noosing the head of her charge with a hemstitched petticoat.