out. It was clearly impossible for him to open the subject again to Mrs. Massington; it was equally obvious that she would put a construction on his presence. The only person who could conceivably help him was Dorothy, and now she had called him a beast.
But, apparently, during the journey to New York she relented, for as they boarded the mangy-looking ferry-boat that conveyed them across the river, she threw a word to him over her shoulder.
' I shall be in at lunch,' she said. ' You can come if you like.'
He did not like that either, though it was better than nothing, for he felt that she had in a sense the whip-hand of him, and knew it. And Bilton was not accustomed to let anybody have the whip-hand of him.
Mrs. Emsworth always took her rehearsals herself; she had a stage-manager, it is true, who sat meekly in the wings, and whom she contradicted from time to time, his office being to be contradicted, and to write down stage directions which she gave him. Occasionally Bilton looked in for an hour or two; him she contradicted also at the time, but usually incorporated his suggestions afterwards. Her author, if it was a new play, was also in attendance in the stalls; his office was to cut lines out or put lines in. Though, perhaps, she could not act, she certainly had a strong sense of drama; that was why she had laughed at Bilton's entrance the night before, for the situation struck her as admirably constructed. She had seen, with a woman's sixth sense, as correctly and minutely as in a photograph on what footing he and Mrs. Massington were, and though she was not in the slightest degree in love with the man—or, indeed, ever had been—yet she looked on him as her possession, and while she did not want him, she distinctly did not wish him to change hands. Jealousy of the ordinary green variety had something to do with
