Minutes passed—­an hour.  She did not come back.  From the room beyond 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 Forty-third Street, with its unaccustomed Sunday-morning quiet.  And he was smiling that rare and melting smile of his—­the smile that was said to make him look something like a kewpie, and something like a cupid, and a bit like an imp, and very much like an angel.  There was little of the first three in it now, and very much of the last.  And so he got heavily into his very grand motor car and drove off.

“Why, the poor little kid,” said he—­“the poor, lonely, stifled little crippled-up kid.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” inquired his chauffeur.

“Speak when you’re spoken to,” snapped Sid Hahn.

And here it must be revealed to you that Sid Hahn did not marry the Cinderella of the storage warehouse.  He did not marry anybody, and neither did Josie.  And yet there is a bit more to this story—­ten years more, if you must know—­ten years, the end of which found Josie a sparse, spectacled, and agile little cripple, as alert and caustic as ever.  It found Sid Hahn the most famous theatrical