EVELYN. I'll be friends, of course. [_Sadly._] But you must never kiss me again.
CECIL [_cheerfully_]. Well, you'll sit down again anyhow, won't you? just to show we've made it up. [_Moves towards tree._]
CECIL [_disappointed; turns_]. A.... Then you haven't really made it up.
EVELYN. Yes, I have. [_Picks up her hat._] But I must go now. Reggie's coming down by the five o'clock train, and I want to be at the station to meet him. [_Holds out hand._] Good-by, Mr. Harburton.
CECIL [_taking hand_]. Eve! You're going to accept Reggie! [_Pause._]
CECIL. And he'll have to tell your mother?
CECIL [_drops her hand_]. Poor Reggie! So _his_ romance ends too!
EVELYN. It won't! If I marry Reggie I shall make him very happy.
CECIL. Very likely. Marriage may be happiness, but I'm hanged if it's romance!
EVELYN. Oh! [_Exclamation of impatience._]
[_Cecil watches her departure with a smile half-amused, half-pained, till she is long out of sight. Then with half a sigh turns back to his tree._]
CECIL [_re-seating himself_]. Poor Reggie! [_Re-opens his book and settles himself to read again._]
[_A cuckoo hoots loudly from a distant thicket and is answered by another. Cecil looks up from his book to listen as the curtain falls._]
Copyright, 1920, by Stewart & Kidd Company. All rights reserved.
The professional and amateur stage rights of this play are strictly reserved by the author, to whose dramatic representative, Frank Shay, in care Stewart & Kidd Co., Cincinnati, Ohio, applications for permission to produce it should be made.
[PLACE: _A Monastery on one of the foothills of Himalaya._]
[SCENE: _In the foreground is the outer court of a Monastery. In the center of the court is a sacred plant, growing out of a small altar of earth about two feet square. On the left of the court is a sheer precipice, adown which a flight of stone steps--only a few of which are visible--connects the Monastery with the village in the valley below._
_To the right are the temple and the adobe walls and the roof of the monastery cells. There is a little space between the temple and the adobe walls, which is the passage leading to the inner recesses of the monastery. Several steps lead to the doors of the temple, which give on the court. In the distance, rear, are the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, glowing under the emerald sky of an Indian afternoon. To the left, the distances stretch into vast spaces of wooded hills. Long bars of light glimmer and die as the vast clouds, with edges of crimson, golden and silver, spread portentously over the hills and forest._