Barrison proffered his own case, and she took and lighted one with a grave, almost a dreamy air. “You see,” she said, “I was brought up in a deadly little Illinois town. While I was still practically a baby, I got married. He was a vaudeville performer, and to me quite a glorious personage. The girls I knew thought so, too. He was better looking than any drummer who’d been there, and had better manners than the clerk at the drug store, who was the village beau.” She spoke calmly, without sentiment, yet she did not sound cynical; her manner was too simple for that. “Well, I didn’t find the Blue Bird _there_. I found nothing in that marriage with a glimmer of happiness in it, until I came in sight of the divorce court. That looked to me like the gate of heaven! Then I went into the movies.” “The movies! I never knew that.” “No, of course not. No one knows it. It’s all right to advertise leaving the legitimate stage for the screen; but if you’ve come the other way, and graduated from the screen to the stage, you’re not nearly so likely to tell the press man. Anyway, I was in an old-style picture company—I’m talking about six years ago—that was working on some blood-and-thunder short reels out in Arizona, when they hired a bunch of professional cow-punchers for some rough Western stuff in a feature picture. Alan Mortimer was one of them.” “Alan Mortimer!” “Yes, or, rather, Morton. He changed his name later on.” She looked at him. “Surely you must have guessed that I knew him before this engagement—this play? How did you suppose that we got to be so intimate in two weeks of rehearsals? _I_ didn’t spend the summer at Nantucket!” “That’s where Miss Legaye met him, isn’t it?” “Yes. She always goes down there, and Dukane wanted him to be there while Jack Carlton was—he was working on the play, you know. But I hadn’t maneuvered and worked and planned for nothing. I’d got on in my profession, and played a few leading parts. I moved heaven and earth to get into his company—and I succeeded!” “You mean—you wanted to see him again?” Her eyes flashed suddenly. For a second she looked fierce and threatening, as she had looked that first day in the restaurant. “Wanted? I had thought of nothing else for five—nearly six years! I used to be mad about him, you see. He made women feel like that.” “I know he did.” Barrison spoke naturally enough, but truth to tell, he was feeling a bit dazed. The Mortimer case was developing in a singular fashion. It was like one of those queer little Oriental toys where you open box inside box, to find in each case a smaller one awaiting you. He wondered whether he was ever to get to the end of this affair. The further you went in it, the more complicated it seemed to get. But she was speaking: