the foot lights nor the big cluster up over the center of the stage nor any of the side lights could be turned on.  A hasty examination of the wiring led to the discovery that the wires which supplied the current had been cut in the room where the switchboard was.  The plaster had been broken into in order to reach them.  This was the reason that the play was not beginning.  The President of the Thessalonians came out in front and explained to the audience that something had gone wrong with the lights, which would cause a delay in the rising of the curtain, but the trouble was being fixed and he begged the indulgence of the house for a few minutes.  The orchestra filled in the time by playing lively marches, while the boys behind the scenes worked feverishly to mend the severed wires, and the curtain went up a whole hour after scheduled time.

The first act went off famously.  Gladys was a born actress and sustained the difficult role of Marie Latour well.  The part where she defies her tyrannical father brought down the house.  Sahwah came in for her share of applause too.  Seeing her composed manner and hearing her calm voice, no one in the audience could ever have guessed the strenuous experience she had just been through.  In the second scene Marie, driven from her home, wanders around in the streets with her child, until, faint from hunger, she sinks to the ground.  The scene is laid before the wall of her father’s large estate and she falls at his very gates.  Gladys made the scene very realistic, and the audience sat tense and sympathetic. “Food, food,” moaned Marie Latour, “only a crust to keep the life in me and my child!" She lay weakly in the road, unable to rise. “Food, food,” she moaned again.  At this moment there suddenly descended, as from the very heavens, a ham sandwich on the end of a string.  It dangled within an inch of her nose.  Gladys was petrified.  The audience sat up in surprise, and a ripple of laughter ran through the house.  It was such an unexpected anticlimax.  That some one was playing a practical joke Gladys did not for a moment doubt, and she was furious at this ridiculous interruption of her big scene.  In the play Marie loses consciousness and is found by a peasant, and it is on this occurrence that the rest of the play hinges.  The sudden appearance of the ham sandwich in response to her cry for food was fatal to the pathos of the scene.  The rest of the cast, standing in the wings, saw what had happened and were at their wits’ end.  But Gladys was equal to the occasion.

Moving her head wearily and passing her hand over her eyes she murmured faintly but audibly, “Cruel, cruel mirage to taunt me thus!  Vanish, thou image of a fevered brain, thou absurd memory!  Come not to mock me!” The actors in the wings, taking their cue from her speech, found the string to which the sandwich was tied and jerked it.  The sandwich vanished from the sight of the audience.  The