Not until they had seated themselves at the small marble-topped table, with two china beakers of milk and some sponge-cakes on white saucers before them, did he speak again. “One should never mystify one’s audience: that is a first principle in our profession. Remember it, my dear, and you will save people from many unnecessary shocks. Now, about this engagement?” So Mornice told him how one Ronald Knight, who was “really awfully nice,” had seen her playing at Colwyn Bay, and had come round “after the show” with a most alluring offer. “They are a new firm, and, just think! they are going to pay me a pound a day—and I’m to play lead in the film. Oh, Daddy fatherums, I’m to play the Village Maid!” And, kissing the tips of her fingers, she dabbed them on the end of the old man’s nose. Taking into consideration Eliphalet’s strong distaste for the Cinema—a distaste rendered more poignant by his own recent unsuccessful exploits before the camera—it is surprising that he did not at once quash the whole idea. The fact remains, however, that he did not. He knew in honesty to his ideals he should have taken up a very severe standpoint, but instead he caressed the end of his nose lovingly, where the sense of the kiss she had dabbed upon it still endured. “Well, well, well!” he said. “There is no better way of learning a mistake than by experience—and that I am not justified in denying you. But after the six weeks, Mornice, you will return to me.” “Oh, you darling, to let me!” she exclaimed, delightedly. “And of course I’ll do whatever you say I must.” He seemed to ponder for a while, and presently said: “What was it you called me a moment ago? Some quite odd name.” “Daddy fatherums?” “That was it—yes.” “Do you like being called that?” “Yes, I do,” he confessed, after the manner of an expert tasting a rare wine. “I do. It is very foolish of me, no doubt—idiotic—but I like it notwithstanding.” An old man will do a great deal for a girl—that is sufficiently obvious; and so, for that matter, will a young one. To avoid losing any of her society Eliphalet shifted the scene of his rehearsals and all the cast to Chester, in which town, on account of its historic surroundings, the film was being taken. His theatrical lodging-book showed no addresses of the landladies of Chester, but Mornice promised to drop a card to Ronald Knight to arrange rooms and meet them at the station. Ronald Knight, it subsequently appeared, was not the manager of the film company, but the manager’s son. He was a young man of dramatic enthusiasm and ambition. In Mornice’s conversations he recurred with great frequency, under such titles as Ron, Ronny, Spud, The Boy—or Pyjams. (The latter being arrived at by a kind of inverted reasoning, _sic_. Knight—Knightie—Nightie; and since the masculine of nightie equals pyjamas, hence Pyjams.)