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 stage, and as they neared the wings her public smile of high society slowly froze. "Perhaps," she said, "because I wrote my sister so."

"Oh." They moved into the shadow behind the reflector of the calcium light. "Did you tell her that I was . . . going in for this sort of thing?"

There was a note of defiance in her flat "Yes."

He stood in front of her, studying the reflection of that tone in her face. He hesitated to believe what it implied. "She must have told him so," he suggested.

"I asked her to."

"You!"

"I wanted them to stop you," she said uncompromisingly. "I didn't think you should do it."

He did not reply. She opened her parasol, preparatory to taking her turn again in the promenade. When she looked up at him, she found him smiling doubtfully. "You're as bad as I am," he said.

She did not understand him, being ignorant of his affair with Conroy. "I beg"

They were interrupted by a cry down the stage—the cry that was the signal for all the street crowd to rush to the windows of the shop and gaze in at an actor who was shouting, "Police! Thieves! Police!" Don lost her in the jostle. When the curtain fell on the act, he went downstairs to the supers' dressing-room, with an expression of face that puzzled Walter Pittsey.

It puzzled Miss Morris even more when he joined her in the background of the next scene; and his amused explanation that her treachery relieved him of the guilt of his own left her still in the dark. She did not