"Anyone with any sense could——"
"Oh, get on with it," said the hero off the scenes. "You'll never get to where I come in, if you're going on like this all day. Pretend she's fainted and go on from there."
"All right," said the villain obligingly. "Aha! I hast thee in my power. I wilt hang thee ere dawn dawns from my remote mountain lair." The toilet-cover train caught on a nail and the petticoat tore with an echoing sound. "That's right," he went on, "go on messin' up my sister's things, so's she'll never be able to wear them again."
"'F you're going to keep on being nasty to me," said the heroine again, "I'm going straight back home an' I'm not going to be in your ole play."
"Well, anyway," said William, with a mental determination that his next play should contain no heroines, "now we go off and they come on."
The hero and his friend advanced.
"Alas!" said Sir Rufus Archibald Green, "I see no trace of her. What canst have happened to her? I hope she hast not met yon horrible ole villain, Carlo Rupino, of the Bloody Hand. Seest thou any footmarks of her, the Hon. Lord Leopold?"
The Hon. Lord Leopold examined the stable floor.
"Lookin' for footmarks," explained the stage-manager to the audience.
"Ah me! None!" said the Hon. Lord Leopold. Then, looking more closely. "Crikey! Yes!" he said. "I seest footmarks. 'Tis hers and Carlo Rupino's. I knowest their boots."