“Well, upon my word,” cried Hardiman, “you are the coolest hand at it I ever saw.”  But he could have taken back his words the next moment.

In spite of Hillyard’s aloof and disinterested air, the night had brought its excitement and in a strength of which he himself was unaware.  It lifted now the veils behind which a man will hide his secret thoughts!  He turned swiftly to Hardiman with a boyish light upon his face.

“Oh, I am not in doubt of what to-night means to me!  Not for a moment.  If it’s failure, it means that I begin again to-morrow on something else; and again after that, and again after that, until success does come.  Playwriting is my profession, and failures are a necessary part of it—­just as much a part as the successes.  But even if the great success were to come now, it wouldn’t mean quite so much to me perhaps as it might to other people.”  He paused, and a smile broke upon his face.  “I live expecting a messenger.  There!  That’s my secret delivered over to you under the excitement of a first night.”

And as he spoke the colour mounted into his face.  He turned away in confusion.  His play was nearer at his heart than he had thought; the enthusiasm which seemed to be greeting it had stirred him unwisely.

“Tell me,” he said hurriedly, “who all these people in the stalls are.”

He peeped down between the edge of the curtain and the side wall of the box whilst Hardiman stood up behind him.

“Yes, I will be your man from Cook’s,” said Hardiman genially.

His heart warmed to the young man both on account of his outburst and of the shame which had followed upon the heels of it.  Few beliefs had survived in Hardiman after forty years of wandering up and down the flowery places of the earth; but one—­he had lectured Harry Luttrell upon it on a night at Stockholm—­continually gained strength in him.  Youth must beget visions and man must preserve them if great work were to be done; and so easily the visions lost their splendour and their inspiration.  Of all the ways of tarnishing the vision, perhaps talk was the most murderous.  Hillyard possessed them.  Hillyard was ashamed that he had spoken of them.  Therefore he had some chance of retaining them.

“Yes, I will show you the celebrities.”  He pointed out the leading critics and the blue stockings of the day.  His eyes roamed over the stalls.  “Do you see the man with the broad face and the short whiskers in the fourth row?  The man who looks just a little too like a country gentleman to be one?  That is Sir Chichester Splay.  He made a fortune in a murky town of Lancashire, and, thirsting for colour, came up to London determined to back a musical comedy.  That is the way the craving for colour takes them in the North.  His wish was gratified.  He backed ’The Patchouli Girl,’ and in that shining garden he got stung.  He is now what they call an amateur.  No first night is complete without him.  He is the half-guinea Mecaenas of our days.”