To Mr. Goble, fermenting and full of strange oaths, entered Johnson Miller. The dance-director was always edgey on first nights, and during the foregoing conversation had been flitting about the stage like a white-haired moth. His deafness had kept him in complete ignorance that there was anything untoward afoot, and he now approached Mr. Goble with his watch in his hand.
"Eight twenty-five," he observed. "Time those girls were on stage."
Mr. Goble, glad of a concrete target for his wrath, cursed him in about two hundred and fifty rich and well-selected words.
"Huh?" said Miller, hand to ear.
Mr. Goble repeated the last hundred and eleven words, the pick of the bunch.
"Can't hear!" said Mr. Miller regretfully. "Got a cold."
The grave danger that Mr. Goble, a thick-necked man, would undergo some sort of a stroke was averted by the presence of mind of the stage-director, who, returning with the hat, presented it like a bouquet to his employer, and then, his hands being now unoccupied, formed them into a funnel and through this flesh-and-blood megaphone endeavoured to impart the bad news.
"The girls say they won't go on!"
Mr. Miller nodded.
"I said it was time they were on."