who wrote this play, and I told him it was the worst thing I had ever seen!” 

 “Did you?” Derek snorted. “Well, it’s about time somebody told him!” A thought seemed to strike him. “Why, who is he? I didn’t know you knew him.” 

 “I don’t. I don’t even know his name.” 

 “His name, according to the programme, is John Grant. Never heard of him before. Jill, I wish you would not talk to people you don’t know,” said Derek with a note of annoyance in his voice. “You can never tell who they are.” 

 “But …” 

 “Especially with my mother here. You must be more careful.” 

 The curtain rose. Jill saw the stage mistily. From childhood up, she had never been able to cure herself of an unfortunate sensitiveness when sharply spoken to by those she loved. A rebuking world she could face with a stout heart, but there had always been just one or two people whose lightest word of censure could crush her. Her father had always had that effect upon her, and now Derek had taken his place. 

 But if there had only been time to explain … Derek could not object to her chatting with a friend of her childhood, even if she had completely forgotten him and did not remember his name even now. John Grant? Memory failed to produce any juvenile John Grant for her inspection. 

 Puzzling over this problem, Jill missed much of the beginning of the second act. Hers was a detachment which the rest of the audience would gladly have shared. For the poetic drama, after a bad start, was now plunging into worse depths of dulness. The coughing had become almost continuous. The stalls, supported by the presence of large droves of Sir Chester’s personal friends, were struggling gallantly to maintain a semblance of interest, but the pit and gallery had plainly given up hope. The critic of a weekly paper of small circulation, who had been shoved up in the upper circle, grimly jotted down the phrase “apathetically received” on his programme. He had come to the theatre that night in an aggrieved mood, for managers usually put him in the dress-circle. He got out his pencil again. Another phrase had occurred to him, admirable for the opening of his article. “At the Leicester Theatre,” he wrote, “where Sir Chester Portwood presented ‘Tried by Fire,’ dulness reigned supreme. …” 

 But you never know. Call no evening dull till it is over. However uninteresting its early stages may have been, that night was to be as animated and 

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