Page:Temple Bailey--The Gay cockade.djvu/28

 youth. It bubbled over. Everybody galloped to a rollicking measure. We laughed until we cried. But there was more than laughter in it. There was the melancholy which belongs to tender years set in exquisite contrast to the prevailing mirth.

Jimmie had a great deal to do with the rehearsals. Several times he challenged Ursula's reading of the part.

"You must not give your kisses with such ease," he told her upon one occasion; "the girl in the play has never been kissed."

She shrugged her shoulders and ignored him. Again he remonstrated. "She's frank and free," he said. "Make her that. Make her that. Men must fight for her favors."

She came to it at last, helped by that Rosalind-like quality in herself. She was young, as he had wanted Elise to be, clean-hearted, joyous—girlhood at its best.

Gradually Jimmie ceased to suggest. He would sit beside us in the dimness of the empty auditorium, and watch her as if he drank her in. Now and then he would laugh a little, and say, under his breath: "How did I ever write it? How did it ever happen?"

Elise, on the other side of him, said, at last, "I knew you could do it, Jimmie." 22