"We'll all have to copy out our parts," continued Mazie rather hastily. "It's comedy, except where Mrs. Tankerville's diamonds are stolen; Teddy Johns is 'Jenks,' the butler; in the last act he's shot, while he's hiding behind a screen, and then they find the diamonds on him, and it all comes out right, of course. And oh, girls, it opens with a ballroom scene, and we'll all have to be dressed up to the nines--wouldn't mamma be raging if she heard me say that--she thinks slang's simply _awful_!" "Was that slang?" asked honest Muriel, opening her eyes. "It doesn't seem to have any sense. But then one doesn't notice it, because so much of your talk is like that, in the States!" "Never mind, you'll learn as you go along," said Kitty encouragingly. "It may take a good while, but you're bound to learn _some_ time. Everyone gets used to our slang in the end, even the very slowest ones!" Mazie again intervened to shunt the conversation on a safer track; she kept on with the question of dress for the forthcoming dramatic performance; and as there were a good many changes for everybody, the scene being laid in the present day, before long she had us all in smooth water once more. Mazie was her mother's own daughter, deft as a juggler among the uncertain knives and balls of social favour; she was fully awake to the difficulties of managing that most unmanageable of bodies, a set of amateur actors. But during the fortnight or so that "William Tell" and "Mrs. Tankerville's Tiara" were in preparation, she and Mrs. Pallinder must have been taxed to the utmost, adroit as they were, to keep things going smoothly, or indeed, going at all. Teddy Johns, who was somewhat given to hyperbole, or, as he himself would have said, to "tall talk," once confided to me that he had a feeling we were "all dancing on top of a volcano--like the What-d'ye-call-'ems over the Thingumbob, you know," he said, gloomily. "I've read about 'em somewhere. Lucky if it don't go off under us!" It _did_ go off, after a fashion, but not quite as Teddy had expected. Teddy Johns displayed more real talent--to call his small gift by a very large name--for the stage than any of us. He was not a clever young man--he had one lamentable failing; but he could control his sallow, solemn face, and ungainly body into expressions and attitudes that would have won laughter from stocks and stones. When Archie Lewis in his character of "Tell" came tearing across the stage, clamouring wildly in the highest style of high tragedy, "Me che-ild, me che-ild! Must I spank me own che-ild?" Teddy could say, "Do Tell!" in an accent of vacuous astonishment that reduced one to helpless and I suppose perfectly senseless merriment. Teddy was our sheet-anchor. Unquestionably without him the whole thing would be a "fizzle." CHAPTER TWELVE