full of quiet earnestness, effaced himself, never thrusting himself forward, talking to them only when they pressed him—­but the handling of the sufferers who would flock to Needley in response to a newspaper publicity and endorsement that had been beyond his wildest dreams, was quite another matter.  Madison viewed the first arrivals—­brought in from the station on cot beds to the Waldorf Hotel—­and retired to his room in the Congress Hotel to wrestle with the niceties and minutiae of the problem.

“You see,” said Madison to the tip of his cigar, as he tilted back his chair and extended his legs full length with his heels comfortably up on the table edge, “you see, I believe in faith all right—­and that’s no josh.  But the trouble with faith is that it’s about the scarcest article on earth—­and I haven’t got any more Floppers to lead the way.”  Madison adroitly sent the cigar ash through the window with a tap of his forefinger on the body of the cigar—­he frowned, and for a long time sat musingly silent.  Then he spoke again; this time addressing the toes of his boots:  “With the house sold out for the season, the box-office doing itself proud and the audience crazy over the first two acts, how about Act Three—­h’m?—­how about Act Three?  Kind of a delicate proposition, the staging of Act Three—­and it’s time for the curtain to go up.  I can hear ’em stamping out front now.  I can’t pull off any more orgies like last Monday afternoon, even if I wanted to—­but everybody’s got to have a run for their money.  Say, how about Act Three?”

Madison burned up quite a little tobacco in the interval before supper, and quite a little more afterward before the setting for his perplexing “Third Act” appeared to unfold itself satisfactorily before his mind—­indeed, it was close onto half past ten when, by a roundabout way, he very cautiously and silently approached the Patriarch’s cottage.

In the front of the cottage, the Shrine-room, as he christened it, and the Patriarch’s sleeping room were both dark.  Madison passed around to the beach side—­here, Helena’s room was dark too, but in the Flopper’s window, the end room next to the kitchen and woodshed, there was a light.  The night was warm, and, though the shade was drawn, the window was open.  Madison whistled softly, and the Flopper stuck out his head.

“Hello, Flopper,” said Madison; “come out here—­I want to have a talk with you.  Helena in bed?”

“No; she’s out,” replied the Flopper.

“Well, hurry up!” said Madison.  “Come around in front by the trellis where we can see the other fellow first if anybody happens to be strolling about.”

Madison withdrew from the window and walked around to the front of the cottage.  Here, a few yards from the porch, by the trellis, already beginning to be leafy green, was a rustic bench on which he seated himself.  The moon was not full, but there was light enough to enable him to see across the lawn through the interposing row of maples, and, hidden by the shadows himself, the seat strategetically met his requirements.