Miss Verepoint. She said it was much better to buy a theater than to
rent it, because then you escaped the heavy rent. It was specious, but
Roland had a dim feeling that there was a flaw somewhere in the
reasoning; and it was from this point that a shadow may be said to have
fallen upon the brightness of the venture.

He would have been even less self-congratulatory if he had known the
Windsor Theater's reputation. Being a comparative stranger in the
metropolis, he was unaware that its nickname in theatrical circles was
"The Mugs' Graveyard"--a title which had been bestowed upon it not
without reason. Built originally by a slightly insane old gentleman,
whose principal delusion was that the public was pining for a constant
supply of the Higher Drama, and more especially those specimens of the
Higher Drama which flowed practically without cessation from the
restless pen of the insane old gentleman himself, the Windsor Theater
had passed from hand to hand with the agility of a gold watch in a
gathering of race-course thieves. The one anxiety of the unhappy man
who found himself, by some accident, in possession of the Windsor
Theater, was to pass it on to somebody else. The only really permanent
tenant it ever had was the representative of the Official Receiver.

Various causes were assigned for the phenomenal ill-luck of the
theater, but undoubtedly the vital objection to it as a Temple of Drama
lay in the fact that nobody could ever find the place where it was
hidden. Cabmen shook their heads on the rare occasions when they were
asked to take a fare there. Explorers to whom a stroll through the
Australian bush was child's-play, had been known to spend an hour on
its trail and finish up at the point where they had started.

It was precisely this quality of elusiveness which had first attracted