At last Mike was persuaded to confess the humble little _rôle_ for which the eminent actors who had consented to be his colleagues had cast him. He was to be the comic boy of a pastry-cook's man, and his distinguished part in the action of the piece was to come in at a certain moment with the pie that had been ordered, and, as he delivered it, he was to remark, "That's a pie as is a pie, is that there pie!" "Oh, Mike, what a shame!" exclaimed Esther. "How absurd! Why, you're a better actor with your little finger than any one of them with their whole body." "Ah, but they don't know that yet, you see." "Any one could see it if they looked at your face half-a-minute." "I wanted to play the part of Snodgrass; but they couldn't think of giving me that, of course. So, do you know what I pretended, to comfort myself? I pretended I was Edward Kean waiting in the passages at Drury Lane, with all the other fine fellows looking down at the shabby little gloomy man from the provinces. That was conceit for you, wasn't it?" The pathos of this was, of course, irresistible to Esther, and Mike was thereupon hugged and kissed as he expected. "Never mind," he said, "you'll see if I don't make something of the poor little part after all." And, thereupon, he described what he laughingly called his "conception," and how he proposed to dress and make up, so vividly that it was evident that the pastry-cook's boy was already to him a personality whose actions and interests were by no means limited to his brief appearance on the stage, but who, though accidentally he had but few words to speak before the audience, was a very voluble and vital little person in scenes where the audience did not follow him. "Yes, you see I'll do something with it. The best of a small part," said Mike, speaking as one of experience, "is that it gives you plenty of opportunity for making the audience wish there was more of it." "From that point of view, you certainly couldn't have a finer part," laughed Esther. Then for a moment Mike skipped out of the room, and presently knocked, and, putting in a funny face, entered carrying a cushion with alacrity. "That's a pie as is a pie, is that there pie!" he fooled, throwing the cushion into Esther's lap, where presently his little red head found its way too. "How can you love such a silly little creature?" he said, looking up into Esther's blue eyes. "I don't know, I'm sure," said Esther; "but I do," and, bending down, she kissed the wistful boy's face. Was it because Esther was in a way his mother, as well as his sweetheart, that she seemed to do all the kissing? Thus was Mike's first part rehearsed and rewarded. CHAPTER XIX ON CERTAIN ADVANTAGES OF A BACKWATER