Baird, he sneeringly reflected, had kept faith with his patrons if not with one of his actors. But how he had profaned the sunlit glories of the great open West and its virile drama! And the spurs, as he had promised the unsuspecting wearer, had stood out! The horror of it, blinding, desolating! And he had as good as stolen that money himself, taking it out to the great open spaces to spend in a bar-room. Baird’s serious effort had turned out to be a wild, inconsequent farrago of the most painful nonsense. But it was over for Merton Gill. The golden bowl was broken, the silver cord was loosed. To-morrow he would tear up Baird’s contract and hurl the pieces in Baird’s face. As to the Montague girl, that deceiving jade was hopeless. Never again could he trust her. In a whirling daze of resentment he boarded a car for the journey home. A group seated near him still laughed about Hearts on Fire. “I thought he’d kill me with those spurs,” declared an otherwise sanely behaving young woman--“that hurt, embarrassed look on his face every time he’d get up!” He cowered in his seat. And he remembered another ordeal he must probably face when he reached home. He hoped the Pattersons would be in bed, and walked up and down before the gate when he saw the house still alight. But the light stayed, and at last he nerved himself for a possible encounter. He let himself in softly, still hoping he could gain his room undiscovered; but Mrs. Patterson framed herself in the lighted door of the living room and became exclamatory at sight of him. And he who had thought to stand before these people in shame to receive their condolences now perceived that his trial would be of another but hardly less-distressing sort. For somehow, so dense were these good folks, that he must seem to be not displeased with his own performance. Amazingly they congratulated him, struggling with reminiscent laughter as they did so. “And you never told us you was one of them funny comedians,” chided Mrs. Patterson. “We thought you was just a beginner, and here you got the biggest part in the picture! Say, the way you acted when you’d pick yourself up after them spurs threw you--I’ll wake up in the night laughing at that.” “And the way he kept his face so straight when them other funny ones was cutting their capers all around him,” observed Mr. Patterson. “Yes! wasn’t it wonderful, Jed, the way he never let on, keeping his face as serious as if he’d been in a serious play?” “I like to fell off my seat,” added Mr. Patterson. “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Armytage,” began Mrs. Patterson with a suddenly serious manner of her own, “I never been one to flatter folks to their faces unless I felt it from the bottom of my heart--I never been that kind; when I tell a person such-and-such about themselves they can take it for the truth’s own truth; so you can believe me now--I saw lots of times in that play to-night when you was even funnier than the cross-eyed man.”