came strange sounds--a woman's voice; the thrill of a song; cries; the
anguish of tears; laughter, harsh and high, as a desperate and deceived
woman laughs--all this following in such rapid succession that Sid Hahn,
puffing laboriously up the four flights of stairs leading to the
wardrobe floor, entered the main room unheard. Unknown to any one, he
was indulging in one of his unsuspected visits to the old wareroom that
housed the evidence of past and gone successes--successes that had
brought him fortune and fame, but little real happiness, perhaps. No one
knew that he loved to browse among these pathetic rags of a forgotten
triumph. No one would have dreamed that this chubby little man could
glow and weep over the cast-off garment of a famous Cyrano, or the faded
finery of a Zaza.

At the doorway he paused now, startled. He was listening with every
nerve of his taut body. What? Who? He tiptoed across the room with a
step incredibly light for one so stout, peered cautiously around the
side of the doorway, and leaned up against it weakly. Josie Fifer, in
the black velvet and mock pearls of "Splendour," with her grey-streaked
blonde hair hidden under the romantic scallops of a black wig, was
giving the big scene from the third act. And though it sounded like a
burlesque of that famous passage, and though she limped more than ever
as she reeled to an imaginary shrine in the corner, and though the black
wig was slightly askew by now, and the black velvet hung with bunchy
awkwardness about her skinny little body, there was nothing of mirth in
Sid Hahn's face as he gazed. He shrank back now.

She was coming to the big speech at the close of the act--the big
renunciation speech that was the curtain. Sid Hahn turned and tiptoed
painfully, breathlessly, magnificently, out of the big front room, into
the hallway, down the creaking stairs, and so to the sunshine of