Mr. Desmond kept his place patiently throughout the third and fourth acts of the drama, though the dreary blank between the two acts was a sharp test of man’s capacity for suffering. He saw Pauline come downstairs to breakfast, in her smart bridal-dress of lace and satin, to go through all those phases of pride and anger, tenderness and yielding love, which form the crucial test of the young tragédienne’s power and genius; and after the curtain had fallen upon Pauline, the subjugated and devoted, Laurence Desmond left the apple-munchers, and whisperers, and gigglers of the dress-boxes to their own devices, and departed, with the intention of penetrating to those mysterious regions which lie behind the boundary-line of the footlights. To an ordinary individual the stage-door of the Oxford Road Theatre might have been an impassable barrier; but the name of the _Areopagus_ was an “open sesame,” against which no stage-door keeper could afford to shut his eyes. The stage-door keeper was not a reader of the popular literary journal, but he had a vague notion that the _Areopagus_ was a paper affected by swells, and that it sometimes came down heavily upon the great ones of the dramatic world, whose genius no meaner organ dared gainsay. To the editor of such a periodical, Mr. de Mortemar would, of course, desire to be civil; and the door-keeper admitted Mr. Desmond, after having submitted him to a sharp scrutiny, or, in his own phraseology, “taken stock of him, to make sure as he was none of them milingtary coves a-tryin’ it on to git behind, and hang about the place a-talking to Mamsell Pasdebasque, which she ought to know better.” Mr. Desmond had never before been behind the scenes of the Oxford Road Theatre, but he had run the gauntlet of the West-end houses; and except that the passages and stairs in the Oxford Road Theatre were a shade or so darker, and dingier, and dirtier, and a little more eminently adapted for the spraining of ankles and the breaking of necks, the Oxford Road was as other theatres.