'Why I've told you already, but you wouldn't listen. On condition that you are not late at the office or absent from it except on holidays, for any reason, either pleasure or illness, for the next two years, your father will pay the debt and help you to start fresh.'
'But how can I be sure I shan't be ill? A man in my delicate state.'
'Oh, assume that you won't. Try not to be—promise to be well. Surely it's worth it?'
'Very well, perhaps it is. What a curious, eccentric man the governor is! No other man would make such extraordinary conditions. Look here, you can write for me, Edith dear, and say I accept the arrangement, and I'm awfully obliged and grateful and all that. You'll know how to put it. It's a great nuisance though, for I was thinking of giving up the whole of tomorrow to rehearsing—and chucking the office. And now I can't. It's very awkward.'
'Well, I'll write for you, though you certainly ought to do it yourself, but I shall say you are going to see them, and you will—next Sunday, won't you?'
'Sunday would be rather an awkward day. I've made a sort of vague engagement. However, if you insist, very well.'
'I can't quite understand,' said Edith, after a pause, 'how it is that the rehearsals take so long now. Yesterday you said you had to begin at eleven and it wasn't over till half-past four. And yet you have only two or three words to say in the second act and to announce someone in the first.'
'Ah, you don't understand, my dear. One has to be there the whole time so as to get into the spirit of the thing. Rehearsals sometimes take half the night; especially when you're getting to the end. You just stop for a minute or two for a little food, and then start again. Yesterday, for instance, it was just like that.'
'Where did you lunch?'
'Oh, I and one or two of the other men looked in at the Carlton.'