"Why, that she should be a star--a real live star. My little gal, Lillie de Lisle. It's her--it's _her_! There can't be two Lillie de Lisles.

Praise be, I've heard of her again. And she's way up top. She's a star."

"Oh, the girl you used to be in love with at the theatre?" asked Loveland.

"Used to be? Was, am, and will be till I end my days. Gee! Every week, whenever there was a spare dime, I've always bought this paper, to see if I could run acrost her name, and know where she was or what she's doing. Once, I seen a letter advertised for her, but that was all, till now. And here she is, a star, on a tour of her own, doin' business as a Little Human Flower. Great, ain't it?"

"Modunk, Ohio," Loveland read again. "Is that much of a place?"

"Never heard of it," admitted Bill. "But geography ain't been my speciality."

"It doesn't sound like a big town," said Val.

"No, that's so. But it's a lucky town, because the Little Human Flower's bloomin' there."

"Why don't you write, and say you'd like to have this engagement?"

"Me? Oh, Jiminy, am _I_ a good looker, am _I_ under thirty with a fashionable wardrobe on and off? Huh! Mine's mostly _off_." Bill laughed, and then sighed. "The good Lord didn't make me for no juvenile lead."

"But if she still likes you, she'd stretch a point in your favour,"

Loveland suggested.

"Jacobus wouldn't. He was the property man I told you about, that got me the sack on account of Lillie."

"By Jove," exclaimed Val, forgetting his own troubles enough to be genuinely interested in the dramatic development of Bill's love episode.

"I say, you don't suppose he's married her since?"

"Can't have; at least, not unless his wife's gone off the hooks," said Bill. "I heard of him not a year ago from one of the boys who used to supe with me. Said Jacobus had married an actress named Thora Moon, a big dark woman, in the heavy line."

"The heavy line?" asked Loveland.

"Yes. Does heavies, don't you know? But you never can tell with pros.

It's married one year and a bachelor the next."

"Widower, you mean," said Val.

"No, I don't, unless it's gra.s.s, and gra.s.s don't count. I should feel mighty bad if I thought Lillie'd married Jack Jacobus. He ain't the right sort. Jinks, I wish they was advertising for a scene painter, instead of juvenile lead. Wouldn't I just whizz out to Modunk like a shot. Say, Gordon, you wouldn't like the job, would you? Great idea!

Why, you're made for it. And you could give the Little Human Flower old Bill's never failin' love."

"I couldn't get them to take me, I'm afraid," said Loveland. "I'm not an actor."

"An actor!" repeated Bill, with inexpressible scorn. "As if they wanted an _actor_ in a show like that, or would know one if they saw him!

You're a good looker, you're young, with a tall, slim figure, and all the other qualifications named."

"Except the experience--and the wardrobe."

"Pooh!" said Bill. "Ain't you ever played as an amateur?"

"Yes, once or twice. They roped me in," said Loveland, recalling a brilliant scene in the country-house of a d.u.c.h.ess, and another for the success of which some of the young officers of his battalion had been responsible.

"Well, then, there you are with your experience. And as for the wardrobe--my goodness, lad, what do you want more than those swell tweeds of yours, and the dress suit you've got on? If it comes to costoom parts, why, the management will just have to fit you out with some of their own glad rags--or make the ghost walk your way in advance."

"You don't seem to think much of your star's company, if you believe a raw amateur, with hardly a st.i.tch to his back, would be good enough for them," Loveland said.

"I don't claim it's a Noo York Company," explained Bill. "I guess they're doin' the barn-storming act. Perhaps I've been kind of carried away, thinkin' of Lillie, and what it would be to get the news of her from a chum. I don't suppose there's much in this for you. Maybe you'll do better at Alexander's, now you're a kind of star yourself----"

"A fallen star," laughed Loveland. "Look at me, and see the marks I got sliding down the sky."

Then, for the first time, Bill noticed that his friend's hair was singed and his face reddened on one side, his white shirt covered with black spots, and his left hand partly in, partly out of, a clumsily made bandage.

"Moses! But you have been through the wars!" exclaimed Bill. And he listened with growing excitement to Loveland's version of the fire.

"Alexander ought to give you a partnership," he commented at last, though Val had made no boast of his own part in the affair.

"He's chucked me," said Loveland.

"Je--_ru_salem! Why, in the name of all that's decent?"

"It was in the name of everything indecent--'villain, cheat, liar, coward'--that he did it. According to him I was all those, and ought to be in prison; though what he meant by his weird accusations, I can't imagine, unless he just hit on whatever came first. I suppose it must have been that. He thought I'd been making love to his daughter."

"Gee! And had you?"

"No. It was a misunderstanding. But I couldn't explain. And the long and short of it is that I crawled in the dust for a few wretched dollars, which it seems I've got to lose, after all. I don't know how I'm to touch any more--unless I do as you say, and get this place with your friend, the Human Flower."

"You'll go?" asked Bill, brightening.

"Rather. If they'll have me. But I haven't even a photograph----"

"Come out with me," said Bill, seizing him by his sound arm. "I know a place where they do you a tin-type by flashlight for ten cents, and finish while you wait. I'll stand the racket. You can turn your good side to the machine; by the time the answer comes, your hair'll have grown out and you'll be looking A 1. Hurrah! Three cheers for Lillie de Lisle, the Little Human Flower, and her new Juvenile Lead!"

CHAPTER THIRTY

Show Folks

"Mo--dunk!" shouted a brakeman, slamming the door of the day coach in which Loveland had traveled since some vaguely remembered hour in the night, when he had changed trains.

He had dozed, sitting on the hard red seat, his head leaning wearily against the window-frame; and he started up at the yell which for an instant seemed part of his dream.

But then, everything lately had been a dream. His weird experiences in New York; the absence of replies from his mother and the London Bank, in answer to his cabled appeals; the coming of the telegram from Jack Jacobus, accepting the very modest terms named at Bill's suggestion; his start from the magnificent Grand Central Station in New York, where the new "juvenile lead" had found his ticket awaiting him. And now, as he bundled half dazed out of the local train he had boarded some hours ago, the dream suddenly grew more bewildering than ever.

What a contrast was this little country "depot" with the splendours of the Grand Central in New York! The rough frame building was little better than an exaggerated shed, and no town was to be seen, across the desolate waste of brown fields which billowed round the railway shelter and its high platform, like a wintry sea round a small, bleak island.

Through an open door of the pa.s.sengers' waiting-room Loveland caught a glimpse of a squat stove, rising like a fat-bodied grey dwarf from a big box of sawdust, and a man who had been warming his hands came out of the room as the train stopped. There were also three or four other men, lolling on a bench outside the window, but they were long-bearded, soft-hatted, tobacco-chewing individuals who had evidently dragged themselves. .h.i.ther through the mud for the excitement of seeing a train come in, and took no interest beyond that of curiosity in the pa.s.sengers.

The man who came out of the waiting-room was a very different order of being, and almost offensively conscious of the difference. He was fifty, perhaps, and tall, with a swaggering walk, which caused the shabby fur-lined coat he wore to swing like the skirt of a woman's dress as he moved forward. He had on patent-leather boots, cracked with old age and caked with new mud. His rather long, straight hair and the heavy double curve of his moustache clearly owed their raven tint to artificial means, but his big chin was blue, and the thick brows over a pair of light grey eyes were still black. The nose and mouth, though ineffectively cut, contrived to express cruelty and an insolence which was accentuated by the upward tilt of a cigar between the strong yellowish teeth and the downward tilt of his badly kept silk hat.