On the dressing-table was the small brown jewel-case and a glimpse of it reminded him:
“If there is anything you’d like to go in the Megaphone,” he floundered, “there was a paragraph in the paper about your having more wonderful jewels than any other woman on the stage.”
He was being unaccountably gauche; he knew this and hated himself. It did not need her quick smile to tell him that she did not wish for that kind of publicity. And then the smile vanished, leaving her young face strangely hard.
“No. I don’t think that my jewels and their value are very interesting. In the part I am playing now it is necessary to wear a great deal of jewelry—I wish it weren’t. Goodnight. I’m glad to upset the rumor.”
“I’m sorry for the bridegroom,” said Tab gallantly.
She watched him out of the room and her mind was still intent upon this broad-shouldered, towering young man when her dresser came in.
“I do wish, Miss, you hadn’t to carry those diamonds about with you,” said the sad-faced dresser. “Mr. Stark, the treasurer, said he would put them in the theatre safe for you, and there’s a night watchman.”
“Mr. Stark told me that, too,” said the girl quietly, “but I prefer to take them with me. Help me with my coat, Simmons.”
A few minutes later she passed through the stage-door. A small and handsome little car was drawn up opposite the door. It was closed and empty. She passed through the little crowd that had gathered to see her depart, stepped inside, placed the jewel-case on the floor at her feet and started the machine. The doorman saw it glide around the corner and went back to his tiny office.
Tab also saw the car depart. He grinned at himself for his whimsical and freakish act. If anybody had told him that he would wait at a stage-door for the pleasure of catching a glimpse of a popular actress, he would have been rude. Yet, here he was, a furtive and abashed man, so ashamed of his weakness that he must look upon her from the darkest corner of the street!
“Well, well,” said Tab, with a sigh. “We live and we learn.”
His flat was in Doughty Street, and stopping only to telephone the result of his interview, he made his way home.
As he came into the sitting-room a man some two years his junior looked up over the top of the armchair in which he was huddled.
“Well?” he asked eagerly.
Tab went to a large tobacco jar and filled his polished briar before he spoke.
“Is it true?” asked Rex Lander, impatiently. “What a mysterious brute you are!”
“Rex, you’re related to the Canards of Duckville,” said the other, puffing solemnly. “You’re a spreader of false tidings and a creator of alarm and despondency amongst the stage-door lizards—whose ancient fraternity I have this night joined, thanks to you.”
Rex relaxed his strained body into a more easy and even less graceful posture.
“Then she isn’t going to be married?” he said, with a sigh.
“You meant well,” said Tab, flopping into a chair, “and I know of no worse thing that you can say about a man than that he ‘meant well!’ But it isn’t true. She’s not going to be married. Where did you get hold of this story, Baby?”
“I heard it,” said the other vaguely.
He was a boyish looking young man with a pink and white complexion. His face was so round and cherubic that the appellation of “baby” had good excuse, for he was plump of person and lazy of habit. They had been school fellows and when Rex had come to town at the command of his one relative, his uncle, the sour Mr. Jesse Trasmere, to take up a torturous training as an architect, these two had gravitated together and now shared Tab’s small flat.
“What do you think of her?”
Tab thought before replying.
“She’s certainly handicapped with good looks,” he said cautiously. At another time he would have added a word of disparagement or would have spoken jokingly of Rex Lander’s intense interest in the lady, but now, for some reason, he treated the other’s enquiry with more seriousness than was his wont.
Ursula Ardfern stood for the one consistently successful woman management in town. Despite her youth she had chosen and cast her own plays and in four seasons had not known the meaning of the word failure.
“She’s quite charming,” Tab said. “Of course, I felt a fool; interviewing actresses is off my beat anyway. Who is the letter from?” He glanced up at the envelope propped on the mantelpiece.
“From Uncle Jesse,” said the other without looking up from his book. “I wrote to him, asking him if he would lend me fifty.”
“And he said?—I saw him today, by-the-way.”
“Read it,” invited Rex Lander with a grin.
Tab took down the envelope and extracted a thick sheet of paper written in a crabbed, schoolboy-hand.
“Dear Rex (he read), your quarterly allowance is not due until the twenty-first. I regret, therefore, that I cannot agree to your request. You must live more economically, remembering that when you inherit my money you will be thankful for the experience which economical living has given to you and which will enable you to employ the great wealth which will be yours, in a more judicious, farseeing manner.”
“He’s a miserable old skinflint,” said Tab, tossing the letter back to the mantelshelf. “Somebody was telling me the other day that he’s worth a million—where did he make it?”
Rex shook his head.
“In China, I think. He was born there and started in quite a humble way as a trader on the Amur River Goldfields. Then he bought property on which gold was discovered. I don’t know,” he said, scratching his chin, “that I ought to complain. After all, there may be a lot in all he says, and he has been a good friend of mine.”
“How often have you seen him?”
“I spent a week with him last year,” said
