Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/225

 his rôle. When every one else in the cast was letter perfect he was still stumbling and uncertain. He began to lose his self-confidence. He could not "read" a single line correctly, because he was trying to recall it, not trying to mean it. No one understood what was the matter with him. They thought that he was simply stupid. When they found him crying in the wings they accepted it as his despairing recognition of his own failure. (He was crying, I learned afterward, because she had sailed from Boston that morning.) The stage director "let him out," as they say. I did not hear of it for some days, and he did not come to me for any further help. He went to Los Angeles with a film company.

Three months later we got the news in Centerbrook that Lieutenant Williamson had succeeded to some sort of title by the death of his two elder brothers in France, and that Flora had married him in the church at Bury. And, as far as I was concerned, the story was complete.

When I saw Conrad Norman in "King Charles the First" I realized what fools we had all been and of what a young genius the spoken drama had been deprived. I realized, also, that the disastrous ending of his affair with Flora Furness had been the making of him artistically. He had qualities of repose and pathos that were marvelous in one so young. His salary was advertised as a thousand dollars a week. At that price he was irrevocably