“Haven’t you an office somewhere where we can talk?” he demanded.  “This is important.”

Evidently the manager saw it was, because he conducted him to a small room with a desk in it, half-way up the balcony stairs, and nodded him to a chair.

“There was a young woman in your company,” Rodney said, “in the sextette.  She isn’t playing to-night.  I want to know what her stage name is, and where she can be found.  I assure you that it’s of the first importance to her that I should find her.”

The manager’s manner was different, too.  He looked perplexed and rather unhappy.  But he didn’t tell Rodney what he wanted to know.

“She’s left the company,” he said, “permanently.  That’s all I can tell you.”

“Is she ill?” Rodney demanded.

The manager said not that he knew of, but this was all that was to be got out of him.

The thing that finally silenced Rodney and sent him away, was the reflection that the man might be withholding information about her, on Rose’s own request.

He went away, sore, angry, discouraged.  Jimmy Wallace seemed about the only hope there was.  But he’d be damned if he’d go to Jimmy.  Not yet, anyway.  And then he thought of Portia!

She’d tell him.  She’d have to tell him.  Why hadn’t he thought of her before?  He’d write to her the message to Rose he’d tried to get Frederica to carry.  No, he wouldn’t do that!  He’d go to her.  And there was a chance ...  Why, there was the best kind of chance!  Why hadn’t he thought of it before?  Why had he been such an idiot as to waste all these days!

It seemed almost certain he’d find Rose there with her.  She’d felt—­she couldn’t have helped feeling after the things he’d said to her that ghastly night in the little North Clark Street room—­that she couldn’t go on.  And stripped of her job like that, with nothing else to turn to, where should she go but home to her mother and sister?  To the only friends and comforters she had in the world.

He’d send no word in advance of his coming.  He’d just come up to the door of the little bungalow and ring the bell.  And there was a chance that the person who’d come to answer it would be Rose herself.

The idea came to him all in a flash as he walked away from the theater, and his impulse from it was to jump into a taxicab and catch a ten-thirty train to the coast, that he had just time for.  He denied the impulse as part of the discipline he’d been imposing on himself since his talk with Harriet, and went home instead.  From now on he was going to act like a reasonable man, not like a distracted one.

He had his bag packed and his tickets bought the next morning, went to the office and put things in train to accommodate a week’s absence, wrote a note to Frederica telling her of his discovery that Rose had left the company of The Girl Up-stairs, and of his hope of finding her in California with her mother and Portia; and when he settled himself in his compartment for the three-day ride he even had two or three books in his bag to pass the time with, as if it had been an ordinary journey.  He didn’t make much of them, it’s true, but his honest attempt to, gave him the glimmering dawn of a discovery.