"Goes! When?"
"Two weeks?"
"Goes! Good-morning, Mr. Corbett!"
Mr. Corbett's exit was immediate.
"I'm glad Miss Elvira made me put all the pieces of my dresses in my trunk to patch with in case I tore anything. They saved us four hundred dollars, didn't they?" Miss Adair said to Mr. Vandeford with gratified business acumen shining in the sea-gray eyes. "I wasn't much in the way, was I?"
"You were a great help, and that was the first time I ever succeeded in jewing Corbett," answered Mr. Vandeford with satisfactory enthusiasm. Something of relief over the guarding of his author showed in his voice, which second note, however, he sounded too soon as the next ten minutes proved to him. "Now we'll discuss the sets for the production with Lindenberg and then it'll be time for luncheon, and we'll go—"
"Mr. Vandeford, sir, Mr. Height would like to be in next," Mr. Meyers interrupted his chief, just a second too soon, or rather just in time, for if Mr. Vandeford had settled Miss Adair's luncheon plans in that second the fate of "The Purple Slipper" might have been different.
"Show him in, Pops, and have the rest come back at two-thirty," Mr. Vandeford commanded.
Mr. Gerald Height entered.
For five successive seasons on Broadway, with brief dazzling flights into the provincial towns of Chicago, Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia, Mr. Gerald Height had been the reigning beauty, and he well deserved it. He was both slender and broad, with the grace of a faun in young manhood, and with the deviltry of a satyr of more advanced age in his yellow-green eyes, which tilted under high black brows that were arched penciled bows across his forehead. His lips were full and red, but chiseled like a youth's on a Greek frieze and they were mobile and tender and hard by turns. His red-gold hair clung to his head in burnished waves, and this head was set upon his broad, strong shoulders as a flower is set on its parent plant, and his smile was a conquering triumph. He poured it all over Miss Adair as Mr. Vandeford introduced them, and took the chair opposite the producer and the author, with the light from the window fully revealing all of his charms.