her own how often I had seen Miss Hill turn from me like that! I grew more and more positive as the play proceeded: it was surely Miss Hill, or, rather, Mrs. Marlot. Her companion, her husband of the play, was certainly not Marlot.

Of course I scented tragedy in the little comedy, the collapse of the love dream of our two poets. It seemed impossible not to believe that they had parted, and in some surprising way Mrs. Marlot had found in the ruins her true métier. For she was a real actress, the little wife of the screen. There was something like genius in the light-hearted abandon with which she accepted her ignorance of the business of making her home and in the restraint she showed in never overstepping the narrow boundary between comedy and farce.

There was one curious thing in the play: during a love-scene in the kitchen at night a face had appeared at a window. An instant it stared in, then slipped back into the darkness. It had no part in the play, was not even seen by the actors; but over the audience ran a little shiver of sound, half sigh, half start, that was the sensitive barometer of its common surprise. It was curious and startling, but to me all the more curious and startling because it was not only the face of Marlot, but was distorted into the sem

blance of an almost malignant hate. What did it portend? Why was it there? It dwarfed to comparative insignificance my wonder as to who Mrs. Marlot's companion player and collaborator might be. I took Braddock with me the next night. I had asked him to go without giving him the reason for desiring his company, and it was not until the play was half over that I felt his start of surprise and knew that he had turned toward me. But I did not turn from the stage, and he did not speak until, at the close, we rose from our seats.

"Most extraordinary! Most extraordinary!" he said. "But Marlot's" A girl in front of him turned back to say to her companion:

"Say, Mame, did ye see that feller at the winder? Well, I'd stick close to my little home, if I was her, with him around. Say, he was fierce!"

Braddock glanced up at the girl, then went on:

"Marlot's face-what did you understand by that?"

"You recognized him, then?" I questioned in turn.

He shook his shoulders impatiently.

"Of course I recognized him. It was Marlot. But what does it mean? What hatred in his eyes! Yet it had no part in the play. It's most extraordinary."

oines. Braddock declared that one could understand how Marlot, in his pride, had first been piqued by her success and at last insanely jealous.

"But why needlessly advertise it?" I objected.

That was clear to Braddock. In the preparation of the play, in taking the photographs, Marlot had glanced in at the window with that look of hate. It had not been discovered at the time, and, later, rather than destroy the films, Mrs. Marlot had allowed the face to remain.

"She would be like that-both too proud and too thrifty to be moved from any course by what she considered the folly of another. You know how imperious she could be on occasion, Pierce."

"Yes, that is true," Braddock acknowledged. He sighed, and then added: "Well, we must find them, Pierce. I shall always feel in a way responsible for them."

In time we found the house where, two years before, they had last lived together in the city. The landlady could tell us nothing. She remembered them, yes, but had seen little of them, as they had been lodgers only. She was inclined to think that they had prepared most of their meals in their own room; they rarely left the house. That Mrs. Marlot had gone away first, and that after a month or two Marlot had also gone, was all that she could tell.

All that strengthened our conviction that the two had parted, and we sought. out the photo-play people who had produced the play. They would tell us little, and we rather suspected them of suspecting that we also were photo-play

people and had designs on their star. They unbent so far as to confess that they knew Hilda Lord well, but they had no knowledge, or feigned that they had none, of any one named Marlot. They were inclined to discredit our belief that Hilda Lord was married, but could not give her address. They added, in explanation, that she had dealt with them through an agent; they would not give us the name of the agent.

In our hopeless case we then turned our attention to the photoplay journals. There in time we came upon far rumors of our broken romance. In fragmentary gossip we gathered that Hilda Lord was in hiding. The face at the window was

said to be that of a jealous lover who had threatened her life, and the whole photo-play world appeared to live in the daily expectation of tragedy. The plausible explanation of the face being allowed to appear in the play was that it

time for its appearance drew near there was always a noticeable craning of necks, and as the sinister face flashed on the screen a hushed, but general, "Ah-h-h!" broke from the eager watchers. It seemed

reasonable to believe that, with the hope of winning the reward for his detection, the face of the lover was more closely scanned than that of any other man in the country. It seemed a fantastical end to the dream of our young poet, who four short years before had meant to startle the world with his inspired verse.

Late in February a severe attack of the grippe paved the way for my taking a long-desired visit to the Bahamas. I had been two weeks at Nassau, when one morning I sauntered into the palmetto-set courtyard of one of the imposing inns of the island that serve as the temporary abodes of our Northern plutocracy. As I walked slowly along a winding path my attention was drawn to a tall young man approaching me. He, too, was walking slowly, turning his gaze left and right in an evident search for some one. He was dressed in white and wore a full black beard. It was the fact that he wore a beard, so unusual in the young men of to-day, that drew my attention to him, and I had glanced at him a second time before something vaguely familiar in his face piqued my interest into a more searching

served as a means of identification for the detectives who were searching for the desperate lover. It was even stated that a reward had been offered for his apprehension.

It was all very thrilling, and we saw the play booked everywhere. The theatres were always thronged, and, drawn to the play from time to time, Braddock and I saw that the interest of the audience in the face had notably increased. As the

scrutiny. At that moment his eyes rested on my face for an instant, and I saw him stop short, then wheel and move rapidly off in another direction. But a voice called, and I saw a young woman in an elaborate gown run lightly toward him from a neighboring path. He had stopped at the call and turned back; but even before I saw the young woman's face I had recognized him as Marlot. His companion, of course, was his wife.

I saw his lips moving rapidly as she drew near to him, and then she quickly glanced over her shoulder and, with a gay little laugh, hurried toward me. Behind her he followed, with a smile that was both welcoming and shamefaced.

"So you have caught us at last!" she exclaimed as she seized both my hands. "Caught you?" I repeated with a smile as I turned to shake hands with her husband. "Doesn't that imply "

"Oh, you have been searching for us,"

she broke in gayly. "We know that. It really did seem shabby not to tell you and Mr. Braddock, you have both been so kind to us and are so discreet; we could trust you, but we told almost no one. When one begins to tell secrets, you know!" She lifted her hands in a gesture of mocking despair.

"Well, if I am not to know the great secret," I began, "may I-"

She stopped me with a reproachful look of her eyes.

"Oh, we shall tell you now," she said. I looked about me vaguely.

"Shall we find seats, then?" I asked. They led me to a shady spot, and there we sat down, the two facing me.

"We're exiles," Mrs. Marlot began at once. "We dare not go home."

"Exiles?" I repeated.

"How much do you know?" she asked abruptly. "About us, I mean."

I told her as delicately as I could of our

22

worry and search and what the search had disclosed, and they listened with a childlike joy that I was far from understanding until, at the end of my long confession, Mrs. Marlot exclaimed:

"Oh, it did work! And we knew it would, though of course we hadn't for a moment dreamed that it would work as tremendously as this. And it was all our own idea-Mr. Marlot's and mine!" "More yours than mine," Marlot declared modestly.

"No," she replied. "Of course I elaborated, but without your idea

"My dear young people," I grumbled, "if you want to talk in riddles"Oh, poor Mr. Pierce!" she exclaimed. "We are forgetting you. Only it's all so tremendous, so fairylike, we can't quite touch the earth yet." She pulled herself together with an effort and said gravely: "Now for the whole story.

"Of course, you must know that we had to begin our life together in a very frugal way. I had saved up a little, and Mr. Marlot was beginning to be well known, but all that was little enough. But he had always thought that poetry could be made practical, could be made a part of life, so to speak, and with a view to finding a medium even before our marriage we had visited the movies and tried our hand on plays of our own. Then shortly after our marriage he won a twelve-hundred-dollar prize for one, and that gave us a start. We wrote more, and then they found out that I could act -I always knew I could-and we began to build all our plays about me as the central figure. A friend who used that little farmhouse in 'The Home-Makers' for a summer home let us occupy it one winter, and there we staged our play, putting in our own experiences, touched up a bit, of course. We had grown in the way of being always on the stage, as it were, and though it was great fun, it soon taught us that, though he could write, Mr. Marlot could not act, in comedy at least. So I brought in my brother to support me. He was on the stage at the time. It was while we were photographing that little love-scene-my brother and I—that in fun Mr. Marlot appeared at the window like that. We had not seen him, but when we looked at the pictures it came

to me at once that that face, so wickedly aside from comedy, might be used to pique interest and advertise the play. When we saw that it did, of course it was an easy matter to deepen the interest by starting all those ridiculous rumors about a jealous lover."

"Braddock said you had a genius for advertising displays," I murmured. Her face brightened.

"Did he say that?" she asked. "Well, when they were started, of course we had to keep in the background. That's why he wears that awful beard"-she nodded toward Marlot-"that and being a pirate. Six months ago we came down to one of these little islands to prepare a new play— a pirate play this time-it is very thrilling, and is ready for the stage, but our managers won't let us come back. 'The HomeMakers' is having so stupendous a success that they fear a new play will destroy the effect of the mystery we have built up about the old one. So, in a way, you see, we have succeeded too well. Our success has made us exiles."

"But very comfortable exiles," I said, glancing about at the beautiful tropic scene.

"Oh, we're comfortable enough,” Marlot said with a smile. That was not enough for Mrs. Marlot. Perhaps she remembered my foolish warning before her marriage, for she added, with a triumphant note in her voice:

"Comfortable! Why, we're wealthy!" "But poetry-Mr. Marlot's poetry?" I suggested. "How about that?" He took me up eagerly.

"We've given it a new character, made it a vital force," he declared; and thereupon he utilized half an hour of our time together in explaining to me what he had done to make poetry a vital force.

The thought came to me later that perhaps I had been more or less influenced by my association with them, for when I left them to go back to my own humbler inn I stopped on the way to cable to Braddock:

"Babes in the woods!' Of all the consummate fakirs!"

That was all; but it gave me a mystery of my own with which to puzzle Braddock. He had saddled me with the poet and his mystery in the first place.