Will fired up as at an insult. Evidently the rogue was not going to be so malleable: that daughter of his, too, he remembered, had no proper respect for Jinny. “Tell ’em I’ll wait here till my beard grows!” he commanded. The chambermaid hung back, giggling. He felt in his pocket for a sixpence—again encountering only lining. “If you don’t take my message, I’ll kiss you,” he menaced. It was a jest that never failed him, and it did not fail now, though the fleeing “tucker-in” giggled more than ever. He watched her enter the lion’s den, but hardly had she done so, when the noble animal himself padded forth, grinning like a Cheshire cat, his fork protruded like a claw, and just-spluttered coffee dripping from his great jaws over the breast of his flamboyant hundred-stained hide. “Where is he?” he roared genially to the dark corridor. “Come in! Come in!” Will advanced defiantly. “So it’s you! I was wondering what wit heaven had dropped with the thunder! Yankee yumour—I ought to ha’ guessed it.” And he nearly spitted Will on his fork in his enthusiastic effort to shake hands. “‘I’ll wait till my beard grows’—ha, ha, ha! That goes in this very night—no, there’s no show to-night, hang it! Don’t go, Polly,” he called, as he pulled Will into the room over a barrier of Bluchers and Wellingtons and even Hessian boots with silken tassels, “we must get that into _Hamlet_. When I say to Ophelia, ‘Get thee to a nunnery; go, farewell’— I’ll wind up ‘Until thy beard grows.’ That’ll be your new cue, Polly.” “But that’ll spoil the scene,” Miss Flippance protested, poised in a morning wrapper in the open doorway between the two rooms. She was mysteriously mantled in aromatic clouds, like the spirit in _The Mistletoe Bough_, yet her father did not seem to be smoking. “Not at all, Polly,” he persisted, “it’s just the right grotesque spirit.” “There’ll be a laugh.” “The one thing _Hamlet_ needs. Even the ghost don’t carry it off.” “You’d better give _me_ the line,” persisted Miss Flippance. “It’ll come better in the mad scene.” “Well, we’ll talk about it—I think you’ve seen our American friend before.” “Before and behind,” said Miss Flippance viciously, a scowl traversing her pockmarks. “And since he left me in the lurch, I wasn’t sorry to think I’d seen the back of him.” “But as Miss Quar—as the Carrier hadn’t got your drumstick, there was nothing to return for,” apologized Will. “Then why _have_ you?” she snapped, and closed the door behind her with a similar snap. VI “Polly’s in a pet,” commented her parent. “She don’t like being worried by actors in search of jobs, specially on Sundays. It’s your hairless phiz, you know.” “But I’m not an actor.” “Of course not—she ought to have seen you haven’t the face—only the razor: ha, ha, ha!” Will was vaguely resentful. “But I dare say I could black my face.”