“Easy there! You’re not going yet,” he cried. “Some of you believe it was a yarn the manager has just put over. But I tell you it’s true, and if any man here to-night goes home and says that my Guv’nor and my friend, Mr. Cardomay, was drunk, he’ll be steering a straight course for the libel court—and what’s more, he’ll get this,” and he held up a closed first with a row of shiny knuckles turned outward. “He’ll get this between the eyes—an’ that’s a promise I’ll keep.” Right into the hearts of those hard-bit Lancashire lads went those “straight-flung words,” and such a roar of enthusiasm followed them as would have wakened the dead. But it failed to waken Eliphalet Cardomay, who lay on his back and snored, with his head on a rolled-up stage cloth and his mouth wide open. CHAPTER IV THE ELIPHALET TOUCH Eliphalet Cardomay was not, in the true sense of the word, a Bohemian. In his own particular way he was rather conventional. He knew he had not been drunk by any intentional intemperance of his own, yet the memory of the affair at Brigan was a nightmare to which even Manning was not permitted to refer. To a man who has formed for himself certain high standards of behaviour, even the inadvertent collapse of any one of these is a matter of acute distress. Eliphalet Cardomay hated insobriety. The word conjured up in his mind a vision of a last scene in his married life. He regarded drunkenness as the thief of virtue, and with Eliphalet virtue was of supreme account. So far as lay within his power he suppressed any tendency in his company toward what is inaccurately termed by laymen, “theatrical arrangements.” To prevent some little wanderer from committing a false and foolish step he would take any amount of trouble. Eliphalet Cardomay was, despite the failure of his own marriage, a romanticist. He would gladly walk ten miles to a wedding, and an equal distance on his hands to a christening. There is a sentimental kink in most childless old men. A wise and loving parent Eliphalet Cardomay would have made, had the fates not willed it otherwise, for he was the very type of sentimentalist who gladly would have given his every possession to have his dress-tie—on the rare occasions he wore one—tied by dainty daughter-fingers. But no daughter bore the name of Cardomay—he was alone and self-contained, and watched all around him a world of apathetic parents seemingly insensible to the happiness that was theirs. And so, in his little way, Eliphalet fathered his flock, guided and ferried them over rough waters, gave them gentle, easy advices, and, without saying much about it, contrived to do a deal of good. * * * * * Some girls are always old enough to be on their own—others are never old enough to be on their own, even when middle-age has made their girlhood a sham.