The star rose to his feet, his face suffusing. “You sit there,” he exclaimed, “and tell me that a member of my company finds the association so distasteful that she wants to get away!”
“Oh, no, Mr. Potter!” the stage-manager protested. “Not that at all! She's very sorry to go. She asked me to tell you that she felt she was giving up a great honour, and to thank you for all your kindness to her.”
“Go on!” Potter sternly bade him. “Why does she wish to leave my company?”
“Why, it seems she's very much in love with her husband, sir, Vorley Surbilt—”
“It doesn't seem possible,” said Potter, shaking his head. “I know him, and it sounds like something you're making up as you go along, Packer.”
“Indeed, I'm not, Mr. Potter!” the stage-manager cried, in simple distress. “I wouldn't know how.”
“Go on!”
“Well, sir, it seems Vorly Surbilt was to go out with Mrs. Romaley, and it seems that when Miss Lyston left rehearsal she drove around till she found him—”
“Ah! I knew she was fooling me! I knew she wasn't sick! Went to drive with her husband, and I pay the cab bill!”
“No, no, sir! I forgot to tell you; she wouldn't let me pay it. She took him home and put him to bed—and from what I heard on Broadway it was time somebody did! It seems they'd had an offer to go into a vaudeville piece together, and after she got him to bed she telephoned the vaudeville man, and had him bring up a contract, and they signed it, though she had to guide Vorley's hand for him. Anyway, he's signed up all right, and so is she. That's why she was so anxious about fixing it up with us. I told her it would be all right.”