From a secret drawer in the bureau I drew forth a small box that I opened with fingers that trembled like Gaspard's.
Bertha joined me and, side by side, we stood gazing at the contents in a hush that was akin to worship.
"Well," said I, at last breaking the silence, "here you are, and for goodness' sake tell her not to waste them!" and into my wife's outstretched hand I carefully counted out—three matches.
AT THE PLAY.
"The Mayor of Troy."
The admirable "Q" has shot his arrow into the gold so often and carried off so mountainous a load of trophies that he can see with equanimity his last shot signalled an outer—even a miss. The signaller must needs be more dismayed than he. "Q" is also too honest and perceptive a critic not to see the weak points of The Mayor of Troy as a stage play, though he may fairly plume himself on the pleasant (and unpleasant) folk of his creation who partly came to life on the opening night at the Haymarket. He will have found out and noted for an appendix to those lively and instructive discourses of his On the Art of Writing that it is a jolly difficult thing to write a play; that an act is not a chapter of a novel, still less a compôte of bits of many chapters; that, while to be charmingly discursive is a paramount quality of the higher type of novelist, the same attribute in a play, whose very breath of life is essential brevity, makes it appear to go on crutches, like his own discomfited hero. It bemuses an audience and gravels the players—as the queer uncertainty of touch of so skilful, so conscientious an actor as Mr. Ainley sufficiently betrayed. But to the story.
CURED OF OBESITY IN TEN YEARS.