Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/73

Rh There was not a show-girl on the Rialto that had a better. It was ideally flat, as flat as a kite. It rose, from a round waist to rounded shoulders, on a line of vertebræ that would be indented like a prolonged dimple. It responded with its muscles to every tug of her arms on the rope of the well. When she bent, it was as supple as a snake's.

Ruttley was a connoisseur in backs—for dramatic purposes. And he said now to himself, as he watched her at the well: "That 's as good a back as Celia Cibber's"—of whom it reminded him.

He said it with a reminiscent scowl, for it was he who had discovered Celia Cibber, and it was he who had lost her. Her sudden withdrawal from the lead in his "By Hook or Crook" had crippled that play at the beginning of what had promised to be a long run in New York. She had gone abroad—to England—nobody knew why—in spite of his furious indignation and the more tender regrets of a public that had just begun to rise to her adoringly. She had given him her address—in care of a London tourist agency—and he had torn it up and flung it on the deck at her feet as he turned to leave her on the steamship; and he had not heard a word from her, or of her, since.

While he was still scowling—at the thought of Miss Cibber—the woman bent to empty the well-bucket into her tin pail, and showed him a cheek, the point of a camel's-hair eyebrow, and a pink ear. He snatched his cigar from his lips and hastily fanned aside a fume of smoke that obscured his vision. She walked across the