“Have faith in the Patriarch,” suggested Helena innocently.

“You close your trap!” exclaimed Pale Face Harry savagely; then, to Madison:  “Go on, Doc—­it’s up to you.”

“No,” said Doc Madison coolly, “it’s up to you.  You’ve got to try, and if you can’t stop altogether you can make yourself scarce when you feel the fit coming on—­you won’t have to climb up on the grandstand and cough in people’s faces, will you?”

“He might carry a screen around with him and cough behind that,” volunteered Helena.  “That’s enough about the Flopper and Pale Face—­what about muh?  Where do I get off?”

“You?” said Doc Madison calmly.  “Oh, you’re a moral neurasthenic.”

“And what’s that when it’s at home?” demanded Helena sharply.

Doc Madison threw out his hands in a comically helpless, impotent gesture.

“It’s what we need to keep up the standard of variety,” he said.  “We’re playing to the masses.  Don’t you like the role, Helena—­it’s the leading woman’s.”

“What do I do?” countered Helena non-committingly.

“Do?” echoed Doc Madison.  “Why, you go down there like a whole parade and a gorgeous pageant rolled into one, in feathers and paint and diamond boulders in your ears—­and you come out of it in a gingham apron and coy sunbonnet as sweet sixteen.”

“Oh!” said Helena—­and her eyes were on the curl of smoke from her cigarette again.

“Say,” said Pale Face Harry suddenly, evidently still worried about his cough, “we ain’t going to have no easy cinch of this.”

“No,” said Doc Madison, with a grim smile; “you’re not!  It’s going to be the hardest work any of you have ever done—­you’ve got to lead decent lives for awhile.”

“Sure—­dat’s right,” said the loyal Flopper; “but we stands fer anyt’ing dat de Doc says—­an’ dat goes!”

“It’ll come hard on some of us,” remarked Pale Face Harry, with a sly glance at Helena, which met with contemptuous silence.

Doc Madison leaned back, felt carefully at his carefully adjusted tie—­and smiled engagingly.

“Well?” he asked.  “Can you see them coming?”

Pale Face Harry stared at him with a far-away expression in his eyes.

“When we get through with this, if I ain’t handed in my checks before,” he said dreamily, “it’s mine for a brownstone on the Avenue, and one of them life-size landscapes with a shack on it for the season down to Pa’m Beach that they call country cottages.  I’ll dress the ginks that scrub the horses down in solid gold braid, and put the corpse of chamber ladies in Irish lace—­I bust into society, marry a duke’s one and only, and swipe her coronet for my manly brow.  Did you ask me anything, Doc?”

“Swipe me!” said the Flopper.  “Me in me private Pullman in a plush seat an’ anudder to put me feet in, an’ me thumbs in de armholes of me vest.  I wears a high polished lid an’ a red tie, an’ scatters simoleans outer de window in me travels to the gazaboes on de platforms as I pass—­an’ den I joins Tammany Hall so’s I can stick me fingers to me nose every time I sees a cop.”