Eliphalet took the drooping hand from the coverlet and grasped it. “It is beautiful of you,” he said. There was a long silence; then Bulmore stirred slightly. “Make it a good funeral,” he whispered. “I will, old man.” As a final touch of irony, the last remaining copy of “Right Triumphant” was returned a few moments before Bulmore’s coffin was carried down the steps. And Eliphalet Cardomay dropped it into the grave beside his dead comrade. It would be profitless and painful to follow Eliphalet through the job-seeking, grey underworld in which, during the following months, he drifted. And while he drifted, he lost heart and his pride began to forsake him. Eliphalet Cardomay disappeared, and left no address. He lacked the courage to confess his real state to Mornice. One deception makes another easy, and about the time he had lied to Bulmore about the play, he had written in answer to Mornice’s constantly-expressed reproaches regarding his dilatoriness in taking the little house, to say he had at last secured the villa of his dreams. To make the story good, he described the decorations of every room from attic to basement, and even threw in a picture of the tamarisks in the front garden. There had been a chance then that the play would bring his words to truth, but that chance had gone, and he could carry on the deception no longer. Thus with his disappearance the sweet ties that had existed between himself and his little adopted daughter were severed. Somehow or another he managed to eke out an existence—but it was existence, and nothing more. Only once did he try to obtain work upon the stage, and the experience was so humiliating he did not repeat it. Somehow he had managed to preserve his old friends, the fur coat, the broad-brimmed hat and the cane which had supported him for so many years. He obtained an interview at a Bedford Street Agency with a flaccid, swag-bellied Semite, who wore a white waistcoat and check uppers to his glossy boots. “Never heard of it,” said this gentleman, when Eliphalet roundly pronounced his full titles. “And there’s nothing for your sort here. I’m looking over a bunch of supers at five o’clock, and if you care to line up with them you can take a chance.” “Thank you,” said Eliphalet gravely, “but I think not.” “Then, for the Lord’s sake, get out. We’re busy here.” And Eliphalet retired with dignity—as befitted one who had held provincial audiences for nearly half a century, and was part author of the finest play ever written. Fate was a little kindlier after that, for he found employment in a tiny Brixton paper shop, owned by a widow. She, poor soul, was so occupied by her husband’s legacy, a girl of three and two twin boys, that to attend to the shop was an impossibility. So Eliphalet sat on a kitchen chair behind the counter and dispensed halfpenny journals, bottles of gum, penny note-books, and pencils with little tin covers to them.