As she came back from one of these momentary excursions she found him staring at her, and with a faint flush and a smile of contrition she pulled herself back, as it were, into his presence.

“I know you’re tired,” he said bruskly.  “But I fancied you’d be tireder in the morning and I have to leave for New York on the fast train.  So, you see, it was now or never.”  Strangely enough, that got her.  She stared at him a little incredulous, almost in consternation.

“Do you mean you’re going away?” she asked.  “To-morrow?”

“Of course,” he said rather sharply.  “I’ve nothing more to stay around here for.”  He added, as she still seemed not to have got it through her head.  “My contract with Goldsmith and Block ended to-night, with the opening performance.”

“Of course,” she said in deprecation of her stupidity, “I didn’t think you were going to stay indefinitely—­as long as the show ran.  And yet I never thought of your going away.  It’s always seemed that you were the show—­or, rather, that the show was you; just something that you made go.  It doesn’t seem possible that it can keep on going with you not there.”

The sincerity of that made it a really fine compliment—­just the sort of compliment he’d appreciate.  But—­the old perversity again—­the very freedom with which she said it spoiled it for him.

“I may be missed,” he said—­it was more of a growl really—­“but I shan’t be regretted.  There’s always a sort of Hallelujah chorus set up by the company when they realize I’m gone.”

“I shall regret it very much,” said Rose.  The words would have set his blood on fire if she’d just faltered over them.  But she didn’t.  She was hopelessly serene about it.  “You’re the person who’s made this six weeks bearable and, in a way, wonderful.  I never could thank you enough for the things you’ve done for me, though I hope I may try to some time.”

“I don’t want any thanks,” he said.  And this was completely true.  It was something very different from gratitude that he wanted.  But he realized how abominably ungracious his words sounded, and hastened to amend them.  “What I mean is that you don’t owe me any.  Anything I’ve done that’s worked out to your advantage was done because I believed it was to the advantage of the men who hired me—­beginning with the afternoon when I first took you on in the chorus.”

This didn’t satisfy him either.  Rose said nothing.  He had indeed left her nothing to say.  But there was a look of perplexity in her eyes—­as if she were casting about for some stupidly tactless act or omission of her own to account for his surliness—­that made him recant altogether.

“I don’t know why in the world I should have said a thing like that!” he burst out.  “It wasn’t true.  I’ve wanted to do things for you—­wanted to do more than I could, and I want to still.  You’ve done a lot to make this show go, as well as it did, in more ways than you know about.  It wasn’t for me, personally, that you did it.  But all the same, I’m grateful.  And it’s to convince you of that that I asked you to come around here to-night.”