By the Thursday morning of their stay he was in the lowest spirits. For three nights they had played to wretchedly bad houses owing to counter attractions elsewhere; his old trouble of sleeplessness was returning and he felt ill and horribly depressed as he walked down through the wet dingy streets to the Shakspere Theatre. There was a rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet, and the insolent manner and insufferable conceit of the Juvenile Lead proved just the last straw. After going through some great agony in life, and going through it well and bravely we are sadly apt to break down under some quite trifling strain. A petty thing will irritate us absurdly in the reaction after great distress, and Macneillie lost his temper now and scolded the offending actor right royally. When an habitually quiet, self-restrained man does lose his temper he usually does it with great thoroughness. Romeo was impressed as he might have been by a sudden thunder storm on a winter’s day, but those who really knew the Manager were troubled at such an unwonted scene, and Ivy glanced at him with the conviction that his health was again breaking down. It was an uncomfortable rehearsal and Macneillie went back to Seymour Street doubly depressed. His thoughts turned to that April afternoon at Stratford on the river. He had been strong then, but “It is very good for strength To know that someone needs you to be strong.” Christine’s presence, though in one sense it had been his most severe trial, had been in another an incentive to endure. To-day, in his lonely room with food before him which he could not touch, with a brain exhausted by want of rest, and harassed by a hundred cares and annoyances, he came perilously near to yielding. For that was the worst of it. The struggle was not one to be gone through once and for all, it was constantly recurring. And always he had the consciousness that Christine’s reverence for law was weaker than his own, that she would quickly yield to his lightest word. It was moreover so fatally easy to go to her, so hard to be loyal to that shamefully unfair law of the land which should be reformed. To check his thoughts he took up one of the London papers. The first thing that met his eye was the announcement that Sir Matthew Mactavish had died in the distant place of refuge which he had succeeded in gaining. And almost immediately afterwards he noticed a paragraph in which was a brief account of the marriage of the Honourable Herbert Vane-Ffoulkes to Lady Dunlop-Tyars, widow of the late Sir John Dunlop-Tyars, Bart. He smiled a little over the memories evoked by those names, but the dark cloud soon stole over him once more. “Villains can die,” he thought to himself, “and empty-headed fools can marry, but I must still drag on this death in life!”