Reading her letter, Tom couldn’t imagine what need she had of him in that galley, but the Coalition could coalesce without his opposition for an hour or two that afternoon, and he might as well go and see what was perturbing her play-acting Ladyship. He followed instructions, went to the front of the house and asked Rossiter’s impressive attendant if Miss Arden was at that moment on the stage. “Mr. Bradshaw, Sir?” He was, and a surprised and flattered Mr. Bradshaw by the time the Galaxy staff had ushered him to his stall with the superlative deference shown to those about whom they had special instructions. He was not royalty, and he was not received by Mr. Rossiter, but he was Miss Arden’s guest and the technique of his welcome was based accurately on that of Hubert Rossiter receiving royalty. As a Labor Member he ought, properly, to have scowled at flunkeydom; he ought to have bristled at the full house, at the sight of so many people idle in the afternoon; and he did neither of these reasonable things. He was in the Galaxy, and, besides, he was looking at the stage and on a bit of authentic Lancashire on the stage. “Yon wench is the reet stuff,” he thought, slipping mentally back into the vernacular. “By gum, she is.” She was remarkably the right stuff; if his ear went for anything, she was Staithley stuff. That must be why she seemed familiar to him as if he had met her, or somebody very like her. But he decided that he hadn’t met her; he had only met typical Lancashire women, and this was the sublimation of the type. She finished her scene and left the stage. An attendant was murmuring softly to him. Would he go round and see Miss Arden now? Tom pulled himself together. A queer place, the theater, making a man forget so completely that he was there on business. It dawned upon him that this Lancashire witch he had gazed at with such absorbed appreciation was Mary Arden, Lady Hepplestall. “If she wants anything of me that’s mine to give, it’s hers for the asking,” he thought, as he followed his guide, still chuckling intimately at the racy flavor of her; no bad compliment to an actress who was thinking that day of anything but acting. She awaited him in her room unchanged, in the clogs and shawl of the first act, which were not very different, except in cleanliness, from the clothes Mrs. Butterworth had burned. “Well, Mr. Bradshaw,” she greeted him, “and who am I?” “Who are you? Why, Lady Hepplestall.” “You’ve seen me from the front, haven’t you? And you didn’t know me? I’m safer than I thought I was. Will it help you if I mention Walter Pate?”