“That was it—yes.”
“Do you like being called that?”
“Yes, I do,” he confessed, after the manner of an expert tasting a rare wine. “I do. It is very foolish of me, no doubt—idiotic—but I like it notwithstanding.”
An old man will do a great deal for a girl—that is sufficiently obvious; and so, for that matter, will a young one.
To avoid losing any of her society Eliphalet shifted the scene of his rehearsals and all the cast to Chester, in which town, on account of its historic surroundings, the film was being taken.
His theatrical lodging-book showed no addresses of the landladies of Chester, but Mornice promised to drop a card to Ronald Knight to arrange rooms and meet them at the station.
Ronald Knight, it subsequently appeared, was not the manager of the film company, but the manager’s son. He was a young man of dramatic enthusiasm and ambition.
In Mornice’s conversations he recurred with great frequency, under such titles as Ron, Ronny, Spud, The Boy—or Pyjams. (The latter being arrived at by a kind of inverted reasoning, sic. Knight—Knightie—Nightie; and since the masculine of nightie equals pyjamas, hence Pyjams.)
Eliphalet was somewhat hard put to it to recognise a single personality under so many alternative names. He gathered that Mr. Knight was well placed in the esteem of his protégée, and on that account suffered mildly jealous pangs. These he was not too subtle to betray—when Mornice would tactfully remark:
“The boy is frightfully anxious to meet you. He just thrilled when I told him I was your sort-of-daughter.”