"It is not that, Miss. As a groom I am perfectly satisfied. The trouble lies in the fact that I have too many other things to do. It is very distasteful for me to act in the capacity of butler. My temper is not equable enough for that position." He bowed. "Very well. I trust that you will not regret your decision." She sat down and coolly resumed her work. "It is not possible that I shall regret it." "You may go." He bowed again, one corner of his mouth twisted. Then he took himself off to the stables. He was certainly in what they call a towering rage. If I were not a seer of the first degree, a narrator of the penetrative order, I should be vastly puzzled over this singular action on her part. XXII THE DRAMA UNROLLS When a dramatist submits his _scenario_, he always accompanies it with drawings, crude or otherwise, of the various set-scenes and curtains known as drops. To the uninitiated these scrawls would look impossible; but to the stage-manager's keen, imaginative eye a whole picture is represented in these few pothooks. Each object on the stage is labeled alphabetically; thus A may represent a sofa, B a window, C a table, and so forth and so on. I am not a dramatist; I am not writing an acting drama; so I find that a diagram of the library in Senator Blank's house is neither imperative nor advisable. It is half after eight; the curtain rises; the music of a violin is heard coming from the music-room; Colonel Annesley is discovered sitting in front of the wood fire, his chin sunk on his breast, his hands hanging listlessly on each side of the chair, his face deeply lined. From time to time he looks at the clock. I can imagine no sorrier picture than that of this loving, tender-hearted, wretched old man as he sits there, waiting for Karloff and the ignominious end. Fortune gone with the winds, poverty leering into his face, shame drawing her red finder across his brow, honor in sackcloth and ashes! And but two short years ago there had not been in all the wide land a more contented man than himself, a man with a conscience freer. God! Even yet he could hear the rolling, whirring ivory ball as it spun the circle that fatal night at Monte Carlo. Man does not recall the intermediate steps of his fall, only the first step and the last. In his waking hours the colonel always heard the sound of it, and it rattled through his troubled dreams. He could not understand how everything had gone as it had. It seemed impossible that in two years he had dissipated a fortune, sullied his honor, beggared his child. It was all so like a horrible dream. If only he might wake; if only God would be so merciful as to permit him to wake! He hid his face. There is no hell save conscience makes it. The music laughed and sighed and laughed. It was the music of love and youth; joyous, rollicking, pulsing music.