Mrs. Wilde swept the children into a corner where they might not see. “Sue,” she cried. “Are you crazy? Have you no sense--no shame?” Sue threw hack her head, choked down a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. Her eyes were radiant. “Thank God,” she cried--“None!” CHAPTER XXXVII--REENTER MARIA TONIFETTI |IT was the opening of Peter Ericson (“Eric”,) Mann's new play, _The Truffler_, at the Astoria Theater on Broadway where the signs never fail and where to have your name blazoned in electric lights above a theater entrance is to be advertised to a restless but numerically impressive world. Peter's name was up there now. It was, you might have supposed, his big night. But Peter was not among the eight or nine hundred correctly dressed men and women that pressed in expectantly through the wide doorway. Instead, clad in his every-day garments, an expression of ill-controlled irritation on his lung face, moody dark eyes peering resentfully out through his large horn-rimmed glasses, he sat alone in the gallery, second row from the front, on the aisle. Four rows behind him and a little off to the left, sat a good-looking young woman, an Italian girl apparently, who stared down at him in some agitation. She, too, was alone. He had not seen her when he came in; he did not know that she was there. The two seats in the front row across the aisle were vacant until just before the musicians climbed from the mysterious region beneath the stage into the orchestra pit down front and the asbestos curtain slid upward and out of sight. Then a rather casually dressed young couple came down the aisle and took them. Peter, when he saw who they were, stiffened, bit his lip, turned away and partly hid his face with his program. The girl was Sue Wilde, the one person on earth who had the power of at once rousing and irritating him merely by appearing within his range of vision. Particularly when she appeared smiling, alert and alive with health and spirit, in the company of another man. When a girl has played with your deepest feelings, has actually engaged herself to marry you, only to slip out of your life without so much as consulting you, when she has forced you to take stern measures to bring her to her senses--only to turn up, after all, radiant, just where you have stolen to be alone with your otherwise turbulent emotions--well, it may easily be disturbing. The other man, on this occasion, was the Worm.