"Yet, through all my thoughts, I was listening, intently enough, now. And in the third act I heard the very words my friend had written: they had not meddled with his lines in the great scene which had moved us both to tears long ago in my rooms. And this I swear to, whether you believe it or no--that at the crisis of that scene, which was just as Pharazyn made it, the calm ferocity transfiguring his face died away all at once, and I saw it shining with the sweetest tears our eyes can shed--the tears of an artist over his own work. "And when the act was over he sat with his head on his hand for some minutes, drinking in the applause, as I well knew; then he left his seat and squeezed out on my side of the house, and I made sure he was coming to speak to me over the barrier; and I got up to speak to him; but he would not see me, but stood against the barrier with a mien as white and set as chiselled marble. "What followed on the first fall of the curtain I shall relate as rapidly as it happened. Louder call for an author I never heard, and I turned my eyes to the stage in my intense curiosity to see who would come forward; for the piece had been brought out anonymously; and I divined that Morrison himself was about to father it. And so he did; but as the lie passed his lips, and in the interval before the applause--the tiny interval between flash and peal--the lie was given him in a roar of fury from my left; there fell a thud of feet at my side, and Pharazyn was over the barrier and bolting down the gangway towards the stage. I think he was near making a leap for the footlights and confronting Morrison on his own boards; but the orchestra came between, and the fiddlers rose in their places. Then he turned wildly to us pressmen, and I will say he had our ear, if not that of the whole house besides, for the few words he was allowed to utter. "'Gentlemen!' he cried at the top of his voice--'Gentlemen, I'm one of you! I'm a writing man like yourselves, and I wrote this play that you've seen. That man never wrote it at all--I wrote it myself! That man has only altered it. I read it to him two years ago--two years ago, gentlemen! He kept it for a week, and then got me to burn it as rubbish--when he had made a copy of it! And he gave me this, gentlemen--he gave me this that I give him back!' "It was a matter of only a few seconds, but not till my own last hour shall I forget Morrison's painted face on the stage, or that sweating white one beneath the boxes; or the fluttering from Pharazyn's poor fingers of the five-pound note he had treasured for two years; or the hush all over the house until the first hand was laid upon his dirty collar. "'What!' he screamed, 'do none of you believe me? Will none of you stand by me--isn't there a man--not one man among you----' "And they threw him out with my name on his lips. And I followed, and floored a brute who was handling him roughly. And nothing happened to me--because of what happened to Pharazyn!"