“How much have you found out about her—­this girl with the ’astonishing resemblance’?”

“Not very much,” Jimmy confessed.  “According to the program, her name is Doris Dane.  I did ask Block about her.  He’s one of the owners of the piece.  But he couldn’t tell me very much.  She’s from out of town, he thinks, and he said something about her being a dressmaker.  She did some work for them on the costumes.  And she started in with this show as a chorus-girl.  But Galbraith, the director, got interested in her, and put her into the sextette.”

“Well, there we are,” said John Williamson.  “That settles it.  Rose never was a dressmaker, that’s a cinch.”

Even Violet seemed a little shaken, and Jimmy was just beginning to congratulate himself on the skill with which he had modified what Block had told him about the costumes, when Violet began on him again.

“All right!” she said.  “Where are we?  You know quite a lot of people in that show, don’t you?” This was a rhetorical question.  It was notorious that Jimmy knew more or less everybody.  So, without waiting for an answer, she went on, “Well, have you been behind the scenes there since the thing began?”

“No, I’ve not gone back,” said Jimmy.  “Why should I?”

“You haven’t even been curious,” she questioned, “to find out what a girl who looked and talked as much like Rose as that, was like?” She concluded, for good measure, with one more question voiced a little differently—­more casually.  “Have you happened to see Rodney lately?”

“Why, yes,” Jimmy said unwarily.  “I met him at the club the other day; only saw him for a minute or two.  We had one drink.”

“And did you happen to tell him,” she asked, “about this dressmaker in The Girl Up-stairs who looked so wonderfully like Rose?  Did you offer to take him round to see for himself?”

“I tell you there’s nothing to that!” said John.  He’d been caught in the same trap, it seemed.  “What’s the use of butting in?  If anything has gone wrong with those two ...”

“You’ve always said there hasn’t,” Violet interrupted.

“And you’ve said,” he countered, “that you were sure there had.  Well, then, if there’s a chance of it, why run the risk, just for nothing?”

Jimmy, as it happened, had never heard even a suggestion that Rose and Rodney were on any other terms than those of perfect amity.  He hoped they’d go on and tell him more.  So to prevent their becoming suddenly discreet, he promptly changed the subject.

“I thought you had a taboo against the Globe,” he said to Violet.  “How did you happen to go there?”

“John went while I was in New York,” she explained.

[Illustration:  “Don’t you know that that was Rose Aldrich?”]

“He’s—­well, a regular fan, you know.  He hasn’t missed a show there in years.  And he was too queer and absent-minded and fidgety for words, when I came back.  I thought a bank must be going to fail, or something.  And when he said, after dinner last night, that he felt like going to a musical show, of course I said I’d go with him.  And when I found it was the Globe—­he already had tickets—­I was too—­kind and sorry for him to make a fuss.  Well, and then she came out on the stage, and I knew what it was all about.”