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 accept the situation as best she could. But at the matinée of the following day—which was Saturday—he made another appeal to her to be kind to Miss Richardson. "She hasn't a friend in town but me—and you, if you'll be her friend. You know how it is to come to strange work like this, without anyone to tell you anything. A word or two from you would mean so much to her. . . . She can't go back home—any more than you or I. She hasn't a penny but what she'll earn. They've lost everything. . . . I'm sure you'll like her. She"

"If I do anything for her," she broke out, "it'll not be for her sake. But I think you're making a mistake. You're doing wrong. You should have sent her home where she belongs. She's out of her place here, and neither you nor anyone else can make her succeed in it."

"That may be true," he said diplomatically, "but it can't hurt her to try—and it can't hurt us to give her what little help we can. Can it?"

She answered "No," but with an evident reservation; and what the reservation was he was to understand after a conversation which they had in the lawn-party scene, that evening.

She said: "I've had an offer of a good part in a new play by Mr. Polk. And I'm going to take it. I want you to wait until you hear from me."

Wait'? I don't under"

"I have some influence with him." She did not look at him. "He is taking a theatre of his own, to produce his own plays, independently. There may be