to-day they have played like a row of wooden ninepins, of straw-stuffed scarecrows, of rot-stricken idiots! They missed their cues, and forgot their lines, or pretended to do so; and then had the infernal impertinence to giggle and gag, blast them! I heard them. I could have screamed. I tried to stop them; and the stage-manager swore at me in the wings, and the scene-shifters laughed. It was a hideous nightmare. The audience laughed--the sound of it is in my ears now, and it tortures me, for it was not natural laughter. It was not spontaneous--how could it be so? It was simply part of this iniquitous conspiracy to ruin me. It was hired mockery, bought and paid for, the mockery of subsidised traitors, liars, imbeciles, the inhuman mockery of grinning apes!" He crushed the newspaper together with both hands, flung it across the room, and broke into hysterical weeping. "For my play is a masterpiece," he wailed. "It is a work of genius. No other man living could have written it. Yet it is damned by a brainless public and vindictive press, while I know and they know--they must know, the fact is self-evident--that it is great, nothing less than great." During this harangue Dominic Iglesias stood immovable, facing the speaker, but looking down, not at him, rigid in attitude, silent. Any attempt to stem the torrent of the wretched man's speech would have been futile. Dominic judged it kindest just to wait, letting passion tear him till, by force of its own violence, it had worn itself out. Then, but not till them, it might be helpful to intervene. Still the exhibition was a very painful one, putting a heavy strain upon the spectator. For be a fellow creature never so displeasing in nature and in habit, never so cankered by vanity and self-love, it cannot be otherwise than hideous to see him upon the rack. And that de Courcy Smyth was very actually upon the rack--a rack well deserved, may be, and of his own constructing, but which wrenched his every joint to the agony of dislocation nevertheless--there could be no manner of doubt. Coming as conclusion to the long day, to the peaceful evening--the thought of the Lady of the Windswept Dust, moreover, and her fortunes so eminently and presently just now in the balance, in his mind--the whole situation was horrible to Dominic Iglesias. But Smyth's mood changed, his tears ceasing as incontinently as they had begun. He ceased to slouch and writhe, passed his hands across his blood-shot eyes, drew himself up in his chair, began to snarl, even to swagger.