There was, indeed, one taller than Montgomery, one whose height numbered two or three inches over six feet, but who paid for longitude by a painful meagreness. Archie--for so Jessie called him--was, in very sooth, a protracted tragedy. The son of a groom, he had been, until the age of fifteen or thereabouts, the tiniest, lightest little chap imaginable. Always amid horses, his one ambition was to become a jockey, and he might have succeeded in attaining this aspiration, had not cruel Nature taken it into her head to make him grow! He had sprouted almost visibly, beneath the horrified eyes of his horsey friends, and ere he came to eighteen years had reached the proud--yet hated--height of six feet three. Poor Archie's ambition being thus hopelessly blighted, he had made no effort to settle to any less fascinating career, but earned his daily bread by doing more or less badly whatever came next to hand. Of such consisted the "star company"! Evarne deemed them all quite suitable individuals to be thus secretly conglomerated in an empty room of a deserted house hidden away behind a hoarding and seemingly forgotten in the very heart of Glasgow. Strange fate that had brought her to form one of the conspiracy! The rehearsals now proceeded daily, Mr. Punter always giving the cues of "Burns's" and "Clarinda's" parts. The chief difficulty lay in remembering "who was whom" at any given moment. Without exception, all the men played a couple of characters, in some cases even three separate and distinct _rôles_. Mad-looking Charles Stuart appeared as a prince and as "Clarinda's" footman--a proceeding that appeared to Evarne as the height of absurdity. Charlie swore he had no intention of visiting the barber, and no one, having once seen that weird head above royal robes, could possibly fail to recognise it again, even though the appended body might, next time, chance to be clad in servant's livery. They would at once discern the prince in disguise in "Clarinda's" establishment, and would accordingly look for intricacies of plot--doomed to be disappointed. If it had not all been really a matter of such serious consequence to her, the girl would have spent her time during these rehearsals in struggling with inopportune laughter. As it was, her expression grew habitually more and more serious as the conviction forced itself like unto a barbed arrow into her brain: "This play is to fail! It is bound to fail! It can never succeed, never; and what can I do then?" For the present, at all events, there was neither inaction nor loneliness. She made the more intimate acquaintance of Joe Harold and John Montgomery by inviting them, together with Jess, to her lodging one evening for a little private rehearsal of the death-bed scene. To her amusement the men had purchased sausage-rolls, cakes and ginger-beer from the shop round the corner, and the business over, they produced these edibles and invited themselves and their hostess to supper.