"I'm afraid I see your finish, Jim," sighed Hepworth. "You'll end as a leader of cotillions. Your head is badly turned." "There's no denying, Hep, that we are apt to set and undue value on what we've never had, and these late-blooming feminine smiles are like a bottle of champagne in the desert." "Oh, dear, here is the roast," cried Fuschia disconsolately, "and Cinderella must run away. Is there no hope of seeing Mrs. Hepworth this evening?" turning to Maud. Maud hesitated a moment, then, "I really do not know," she confessed frankly, "she--she has not been particularly well all day." She simply could not plead for Perdita the conventional bad headache while Hepworth's steady eyes were fixed upon her. Fuschia, who happened to be looking at him, saw a quick shade of disappointment pass over his face, and her impulsive sympathy was roused by the depth and poignancy of that immediately suppressed emotion. She threw herself into the breach. "Oh, I want dreadfully to see her to-night about the gown I am to wear when I play the scheming adventuress next week. We were to have decided it to-night. She is thinking of putting me in green instead of the usual black with touches of scarlet, and the accustomed badge of the adventuress, high-heeled scarlet slippers. And I am so anxious to know if Mrs. Hepworth has decided upon green, a wonderful, wicked, dazzling green, with strange blue lights in the shadows. Oh, may I send a message and ask her to see me just a moment?" But before Maud could answer, Perdita entered the room. She pleaded the usual headache, which Maud had so carefully avoided, and that threadbare social fiction was for once upheld and substantiated. Dita's appearance fully bore it out. Her face was pale, her eyes heavy. She promised, however, to give a full consideration to the question of Fuschia's green gown the next morning, and the actress who had already overstayed the limits of the time she had allotted herself prepared to take her departure. "Oh," she cried from the door, "I forgot to announce my two important bits of good news. Mr. Martin is going to write me a comedy and Eugene Gresham is going to paint my portrait." A faint smile hovered for one moment about Perdita's lips. "When did Eugene make his request?" she asked in her usual low tones, although her head lifted suddenly. "This afternoon," replied Fuschia, and Dita's smile deepened. "And he is going to give me a fete in his studio." "The usual ball in the artist's studio?" laughed Maud looking at Martin. "Don't you dream it," Fuschia laughed irrepressibly, also; "not the stage kind with its crowd of maskers. This is to be patterned after an afternoon among the great artists in Japan. You wear Japanese things and crawl through a little door into a room with nothing in it but just one perfect flower in a perfect vase, and we will all sit on the floor and drink tea."