the profession off the boards gave him a thrill. There was a resting
juvenile, of fit-up calibre, at his boarding-house who could always get
a shilling out of him simply by talking about how he had jumped in and
saved the show at the hamlets which he had visited in the course of his
wanderings. And on this 'Girl From Brighton' tour he was in constant
touch with men who really amounted to something. Walter Jelliffe had
been a celebrity when Henry was going to school; and Sidney Crane, the
baritone, and others of the lengthy cast, were all players not unknown
in London. Henry courted them assiduously.

It had not been hard to scrape acquaintance with them. The principals
of the company always put up at the best hotel, and--his expenses being
paid by his employer--so did Henry. It was the easiest thing possible
to bridge with a well-timed whisky-and-soda the gulf between
non-acquaintance and warm friendship. Walter Jelliffe, in particular,
was peculiarly accessible. Every time Henry accosted him--as a
different individual, of course--and renewed in a fresh disguise the
friendship which he had enjoyed at the last town, Walter Jelliffe met
him more than half-way.

It was in the sixth week of the tour that the comedian, promoting him
from mere casual acquaintanceship, invited him to come up to his room
and smoke a cigar.

Henry was pleased and flattered. Jelliffe was a personage, always
surrounded by admirers, and the compliment was consequently of a high
order.

He lit his cigar. Among his friends at the Green-Room Club it was
unanimously held that Walter Jelliffe's cigars brought him within the