“But you don’t know my name?” murmured Will, with the stir of adventure and brandy in his veins. “Pooh! What’s in a name? A nose by any other name would swell as red.” And, laughing, he clapped Will on the shoulder. “We’ll spruce up the tent too, and slick up the caravan—a dingy old hearse ain’t the best advertisement on a tour. And why shouldn’t you take some of the parts? Pity to waste your twang. We’d get some American figures made—cowboys and slave-dealers and such—and spice our ghosts and goblins with Colonel Bowie knives and Yankee yumour. We might even turn the bridegroom in _The Mistletoe Bough_ into a rich New-Yorker, and make the bride moulder away in an American trunk. There’s a fortune in it. I don’t mean in the trunk—ha, ha, ha!” With a last instinct of sanity Will observed maliciously that it was Sunday. He merely meant to remind Tony that that was his day for truth. But the Showman’s glass nearly fell from his fingers. “You too!” he said. “And that Jinny—as lively a girl as ever stepped. And Mother Gander—as buxom a landlady as ever bussed a bagman. What’s come over the East Anglian circuit? And I took you for a man of the world.” Unwilling to repudiate that status, Will remarked flabbily that precisely as a man of the world he didn’t see any money in marionettes. “No money!” Mr. Flippance swelled with indignation as he pointed out that Drury Lane and the mines of Golconda were not in it with marionettes, properly equipped and spring-cleaned; the public was simply panting for high-class puppets. It goaded Will to emphasize his meaning. “Is this your Sunday talk or your week-day talk?” he interrupted dryly. “Didn’t you just tell me that you’re doing badly?” Mr. Flippance admitted it almost without a wince. And had he not given the reason? To take money out you must put money in. “I tell you there’s a fortune in it,” he repeated. “Sunk?” asked Will blandly. He added vengefully that he would consider a partnership when the stuffed elephant came home from the Crystal Palace. Tony, in crimson comprehension, rushed at the litter on the spare chair and dragged out a newspaper from under the neckties. “Read that!” he said sublimely, “the _Essex County Chronicle_!” And his semi-gilded forefinger indicated a heavily blued passage. “Our readers will be interested to know,” read Will, “that it is a local showman who supplied the great stuffed elephant that holds Her Majesty’s gorgeous howdah in Mr. Paxton’s marvellous glass——” He dropped the paper. “I beg your pardon!” he said, too disconcerted to realize that the “local” showman need not necessarily be Tony Flip. “But I really would rather not talk business to-day, and I don’t know anything about yours—that wasn’t my line in the States. I never even saw a puppet-show in my life, outside Punch and Judy. A real live drama now——” he concluded vaguely, meaning that he had at least seen real plays, and utterly unforeseeing the effect the remark would have upon his host.