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it was as though I heard her voice again after nine years’ silence. I sent her flowers, with a message—love from some one you have forgotten. Have I said she was impetuous? Wild, unreasoning, sudden—and irresistible. My flowers had barely reached this house when she called me on the telephone. She caught me at the theater, made up, ready to go on. ‘Bob,’ she said, ‘you must come at once. You must. I want so much to see you. I am waiting.’”

He glanced at Chan, and shrugged. ‘Any other woman, and I would have answered: ‘After the show.’ Somehow, that was never the way one replied to Shelah. ‘Coming’—that was always the answer when Shelah spoke.

“It was a rather mad idea, but possible. I had arrived at the theater early, I needn’t go on for forty-five minutes. I had a car and could drive out here, if I rushed it a bit, in fifteen minutes each way. So, at seven-thirty, I went into my dressing-room on the ground floor of the building, locked the door on the inside, and stepped through a window into the alley that runs along beside the theater.

“Shelah had told me about the pavilion, she said she was giving a dinner party, but that I needn't meet any of the guests—my make-up, you know, and all that. She wanted to see me alone, anyhow. I reached here about seven-forty-five. Shelah met me on the lawn, and we went to the pavilion. She looked at me in a strange way—I wondered if she still cared for me. I was shocked at the change in her—when I knew her she was fresh and lovely and so very gay. Hollywood had altered her greatly. Oh, well—none of us grows younger, I suppose. We wasted precious