A spark of amusement lit Helen's eyes. "You might call him that when you meet him next." Hugh, with a sudden remembrance of the playwright's powerful frame, replied, a little less truculently: "I'll call him something more fit than that when I see him. But we won't see him again. He's out of the running." Helen laid her cheek on her folded hands, and, with a smile which cleared the air like a burst of sunshine, said, laughingly: "Hugh, you're a big, bad boy. You should be out on the ice skating instead of managing a theatre. You have no more idea of George Douglass than a bear has of a lion. This mood of depression is only a cloud; it will pass and you will be glad to beg his pardon. My faith in him and in _Lillian's Duty_ is unshaken. He has the artistic temperament, but he has also the pertinacity of genius. Come, let's all go to bed and forget our hurts." And with this she rose and kissed her mother good-night. Hugh, still moody, replied, with sudden tenderness: "It hurt me to see them go out on your last scene. I can't forgive Douglass for that." She patted his cheek. "Never mind that, Hughie. 'This, too, shall pass away.'" X At two o'clock, when Douglass returned to his hotel, tired and reckless of any man's scorn, the night clerk smiled and said, as he handed him a handful of letters, "I hear you had a great audience, Mr. Douglass." The playwright did not discover Helen's note among his letters till he had reached his room, and then, without removing his overcoat, he stood beneath the gas-jet and read: