“I want to talk over the next picture with you this evening,” he said. “I’m asking Frank Donnell to dine with me at my rooms. Will you come?” She halted at the open door of the car and gave him a surprised and happy look. “Frank Donnell? I’d love to come. But, Mr. Smull!--you don’t mean that Mr. Donnell is to direct _me_!” “We’ll see,” he smiled. “But--Betsy! I _couldn’t_ do that to _her_!” Or to anybody, she might have added. But the mere thought of Frank Donnell brought pleasure and gratitude. “You’re so wonderfully kind, Mr. Smull,” she said with another radiant look as he aided her to enter the car. As he got in after her a pallid, shabby man across the street watched her intently. He seemed interested in Smull, too, and in the shining car, and even in the license number. And he stood looking after it as long as it remained in sight. * * * * * That afternoon Eris sat idle in her dressing-room, reading, or wandered about among electric cables and lumber and sets while Mr. Creevy tried to fill in and supplement poor directorship with little fiddling re-takes. Emil Shunk, the camera-man, slightly drunk, had turned very sulky. Most of the afternoon was wasted in futile altercation with Creevy, until the latter, exasperated, dismissed everybody. The taxi allotted to Eris took her back to the city, tired, disgusted, and a little nervous. The last profane scene between Creevy and Shunk, her all-day idleness, the stifling summer heat in the studio, the jolting drive back to New York through the squalor of the river-front, all these left her tired and depressed. In her own apartment, bathed, freshened of the city’s penetrating grime, and now at her ease in a cool morning wrap, she sipped the tea that Hattie brought and then stretched out on the sofa, thankful to rest body and mind. For a wonder, Jane Street was quiet that hot afternoon. The blessed stillness healed her ears of the blows of sound; she lay in the pleasant demi-light of lowered shades, disinclined to stir, to speak, to think. But thinking can be stopped only by sleep. She remembered that she was to call Annan when she got home. Somehow she didn’t feel like it. Lying there, her hands clasped under her chestnut curls, grey eyes widely remote, the idle thoughts went drifting through her mind, undirected, unchecked. Visions of the past glimmered, went out, followed by others that floated by like phantoms--glimpses of Whitewater Farms, of her father in his spotless milking jacket, of a girl standing with ears stopped and eyes desperately shut while the great herd-bull died.