It is always disappointing when one’s opinions prove to be at fault. Possibly this in some measure added to Eliphalet’s cold fury at what took place that evening. He had gone down earlier than usual and was standing in the wings, watching the Play Scene. Mornice and Kenneth Luke as the Player King and Queen, with arms interlaced, came on to the stage within the stage and began to speak their lines, and there followed the most paltry piece of meanness Eliphalet had ever beheld. A deliberate effort to “queer” a fellow-player. Seemingly Kenneth Luke had profited nothing by his lesson of the morning and was determined to take it out of his mentor by the unkindest method. He ended his first speech with so inconclusive an inflection that it was well-nigh impossible for her to speak her lines. Not satisfied with this, he introduced long pauses in the wrong places and when she, believing he had forgotten his part, began to speak, he spoke also, with the result that the words jumbled together unintelligibly. Mornice did her best, but had lost the thread of the scene and broke down. So Kenneth prompted her audibly, and no sooner had she started than he essayed to “queer” her afresh. But that was not all, for when, in the course of the scene, he lay down for his afternoon repose, or “secure hour,” he contrived to lie upon the train of her gown. Certainly he did it very discreetly, and none but Eliphalet saw. It appeared from the front to be mere carelessness when Mornice, in backing from the stage, stumbled, tried to recover herself and fell noisily down the rostrum steps. The effect of a roar of laughter in that part of the play can be imagined. The act, in the vulgar parlance, was “dished.” Even through his make-up of ghostly green Eliphalet Cardomay went quite purple. To trifle with one’s art was to him an unforgivable offence—but when that trifling was done in a Shakespearian production, a London theatre, and as a piece of sheer malice against a young girl——! The muscles of his hands knotted convulsively. This was a matter that could be dealt with in only one way. He made a movement toward the back of the stage, then checked himself. He would be wanted for his last scene in a moment. He must wait until after that, and then——! It is to be feared that Eliphalet Cardomay’s countenance did not wear that expression of seraphic benignity it should when he appeared behind the gauzy curtain and Hamlet spoke the lines, “Look here upon this picture and on this.” He contrived to impart the full measure of appeal into the final words, “Speak to her, Hamlet,” then hurried from the stage, stripping off his draperies and breathing through the nose. On the first dressing-room landing Mornice was standing, and before her, looking very different from his usual placid self, was Mr. Winslow Dawson. “That sort of thing may do for the provinces,” he was saying, “but it won’t do in the Mall Theatre. I have never seen such an exhibition.”