The morning hours grew strangely silent. Gone was the light laughter, banished the echo of gay voices, the quick coming and going of youthful feet; indeed, to any one entering suddenly and unknowing, the air of the house was so changed and transformed they might well exclaim, "The place is haunted!" And haunted it certainly was, but with fair ghosts in modern raiment, who, if they moved about at all, did so with tragic step and abstracted gaze, or with comic gesture and exaggerated action, accompanied by eagerly-moving lips, from which, however, no sound proceeded, while each and all held, tightly clasped and closely scanned, one of those thin yellow paper books which Mr. French has made so happily familiar to all of us. Indeed, as Dick Darling remarked, with a piteous shake of her head, and a twisting up of her round mouth, "There wasn't such a thing as a 'rise' to be got out of any one of them, since the craze for acting had descended upon them." Now and then George Newbold, in honour of whose birthday all this commotion was undertaken, would come upon a solitary group of two--always a girl and a man--who evidently considered learning in couples the quickest way, and who would scowl upon him distractedly when he approached them, or seem wrapped in contemplation of the other's genius as, with halting speech and flushed face, he or she repeated their respective lines. Mr. Newbold had been heard to declare more than once within the safe precincts of the smoking-room, in language more forcible than polite, that for his part, he should be glad when the "shindy" was all over; and as to its having anything to do with him, or his birthday, it was a--lie. He didn't see where his fun came in, since he took no part in it. "Paying the bills, old man," replied Jack Howard, lazily, to this outburst; "what more can you ask? Isn't that the proud position and boast of the typical American husband?" To which grim comfort George only replied by lighting a very large and disreputable-looking pipe, and smoking furiously. Miss James was among those who elected to study _à deux_, and had undertaken, in this way, Jack Howard's education, who, much to Baby Leonard's chagrin, had become in some manner, the clever Rosalie's slave. Baby, with tears in her eyes, marked his defalcation from her ranks, and with a feeling of self-pity and wounded vanity, sought compensation in Freddy Slade, and absorption in her rôle.