"I'd have been a fool not to. Here's a girl comes to me out of the _ewigkeit_. No name, no story, nothing. Won't tell me who she is or where she has played before. Just says, 'I've read about Constant Hayter's play--I know Derbyshire; I have loved the tradition of that story all my life. Money is nothing to me. Let me play the part Miss Fay Warner has given up. Let me play it at rehearsal, and then say whether you wish me to go on.' You couldn't better it in a fairy book. I see her act a scene, hear her speak twenty lines, and say, 'That's bully.' She doesn't ask a salary--why, sir, the girl's a genius born and bred--and what's more she's a lady from the top of her hat to the soles of her boots. I couldn't wish my own daughter to behave better." "Something odd about her all the same," Lacombe reflected; "dreadfully afraid of being known. She goes in and out of the theatre like a ghost." Mr. Charles Izard laughed again. "Well, don't she play the part of one?" he asked affably. "How would you have her come in and out? Whistling like the overhead? The part's herself--the Lady of Haddon. She was born to it. If that girl hasn't walked as a ghost sometime or other, put me down for twenty pounds to an hospital. And no salary, sir, not a single penny." "Immense," said Lacombe, but immediately paused as a well-known critic passed through the hall and went out to the theatre almost adjoining the hotel. "There's Clayaton," he went on quickly, "it's not often he sits out a sword-and-cape drama." "Then he'll sit out one to-night and be ashamed of himself in the morning. Let's get, my boy, it's just on the half-hour. We must be there." What precisely would have happened had so great a man not been there, the merely humble individual might hardly dare to say. As events went, Mr. Charles Izard put on a light great-coat with a great deal of splendid ceremony, and giving the many-colored lackey a shilling, strolled pompously into the street with his cigar still alight. Passing His Majesty's, before whose doors the boards "House Full" were conspicuously displayed, the pair walked leisurely on to the front entrance of the Carlton Theatre, and were there gratified by one of those spectacles which London alone can display upon the first night of a new production.