"You do like me, don’t you?" he breathed exultantly, while the curtain was down for an instant. Marien answered with her eyes and a quick affirmative nod, before the curtain bounded upward again for a last picture of husband and wife gazing into each other’s eyes with a look expressing an infinitude of fondness. But John had ceased to be Archibald. What his look expressed was an infinitude of mystery and joy. "And they say there is no satisfaction in a stage kiss!" he whispered to himself as he leaped up the stairs to his dressing room. *CHAPTER XI* *SEED TO THE WIND* The next night Miss Dounay gave John her forehead instead of her lips to kiss, but she heckled him no more, and it was perfectly obvious to him, as to Parks, that she helped him deliberately and had been helping him all along by her stage direction. "If you’ve got her interested in you, you’re fixed for life," grumbled Parks wistfully. "That girl’s going up the line, and she’s got stuff enough to take somebody else with her." There was a suggestion in this which John resented. "I’m going up, too," he rejoined with the defiant exuberance of youth, "but on my own steam." Parks looked at John up and down, and laughed,—just that and nothing more. The old man’s frankness was comforting at times; at others disagreeable. John moved away irritated, and his head went up into the clouds of his dreams. But there was something in what Parks had suggested that kept coming back to his mind. True, Miss Dounay never exchanged more than the merest words of courtesy with John off the stage. But on the stage and at rehearsal it really did seem as if there was a very nice little understanding growing up between them. Off stage John dreamed of going to call upon her. In his little room he thought of her much and hungrily. That he should think hungrily was not strange, since he was hungry. His salary was twenty dollars a week. To send half to Rose, and save money to meet his wardrobe bills, he lived on two meals a day. The morning meal, taken at half-past nine, consisted of coffee and cakes, and cost ten cents. The evening meal was taken at half-past five. It was a grand course dinner that went from soup to pie, and its cost was fifteen cents. The tip to the waitress was a smile.