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“Your overcoat, Mr. Potter!” called that faithful servitor as Potter was going out through the theatre with old Tinker and Canby. “You've forgotten your overcoat, sir.”
“I don't want it.”
“Yes sir; but it's a little raw to-day.” He leaped down into the orchestra from the high stage, striking his knee upon a chair with violence, but, pausing not an instant for that, came running up the aisle carrying the overcoat. “You might want it after you get out into the air, Mr. Potter. I'm sure Mr. Tinker or Mr. Canby won't mind taking charge of it for you until you feel like putting it on.”
“Lord! Don't make such a fuss, Packer. Put it on me—put it on me!”
He extended his arms behind him, and was enveloped solicitously and reverently in the garment.
“Confound him!” said Potter good-humouredly, as they came out into the lobby. “It is chilly; he's usually right, the idiot!”
Turning from Broadway, at the corner, they went over to Fifth Avenue, where Potter's unconsciousness of the people who recognized and stared at him was, as usual, one of the finest things he did, either upon the stage or “off.” Superb performance as it was, it went for nothing with Stewart Canby, who did not even see it, for he walked entranced, not in a town, but through orchards in bloom.
If Wanda Malone had remained with him, clear and insistent after yesterday's impersonal vision of her at rehearsal, what was she now, when every tremulous lilt of the zither-string voice, and every little gesture of the impulsive hands, and every eager change of the glowing face, were fresh and living, in all their beautiful reality, but a matter of minutes past? He no longer resisted the bewitchment; he wanted all of it. His companions and himself were as trees walking, and when they had taken their seats at a table in the men's restaurant of a hotel where he had never been, he was not roused from his rapturous apathy even by the conduct of probably the most remarkable maitre d'hotel in the world.
“You don't git 'em!” said this personage briefly, when Potter had ordered chops and “oeufs a la creole” and lettuce salad, from a card. “You got to eat partridge and asparagus tips salad!”