Meanwhile, Margaret had been given over to the stage manager, and waited eagerly for the rehearsal to begin. It was uglier than she had expected. The gaping, empty theatre, covered with holland sheets; the dusty stage, with its whitewashed walls, and lumbering scenery packed together, standing up against them; the every-day clothes of the actors and actresses, made it all so vastly different a matter from seeing a play at night from the stalls with her father; but it was absurd of her, she thought, not to have remembered that it would be so; "it is like being at the back of the world," she thought. The company was a good-sized one, and Margaret, shy and awkward, stood apart, looking at it. Some of its members were ladies and gentlemen; they glanced at her, curiously wondering who she was, but only for a moment; they were intent on their own life battle. Some were not ladies and gentlemen, but tawdry make-believes, or shabby and anxious-looking. One or two of them looked as if they would have spoken to her, but she gave them no chance. When Dawson Farley came on he was busy and full of the responsibility of a great speculation; he had forgotten all about her. Even in that first day she realized that she was a little unit of no account in an important whole. True, when she had to go across the stage at the end of the first act, he turned his head for a moment. She walked well, he thought; if he heard that she was intelligent, he might some day give her a small part. She was beautiful; he realized that. Ten years ago the story of Louise Hunstan might have been repeated (on his part), but now he was wiser. Then it struck him, as he waited in the wings, that her mother had looked ill the other day, like a woman who was not going to live long, and that if she died Mrs. Lakeman might want to marry her old lover, Gerald Vincent. Perhaps it would be wise if he tried to hurry things up a little.