“What did they ask you?” demanded young Palmer.

“My name and address,” said Alleyn shortly. He dragged forward a small packing-case, sat on it, and surveyed the company.

The wardrobe-room at the Royal was simply a very large dressing-room, occupied by the chorus when musical-comedy companies visited Middleton. The Dacres Company used it to store the wardrobes for their second and third productions. An ironing-table stood at one end, an odd length of stage-cloth carpeted the floor, and a number of chairs, covered with dust-cloths, were ranged round the walls. It served the company as a sort of common-room—an improvised version of the old-fashioned green-room. Carolyn tried to create something of the long-vanished atmosphere of the actor-manager’s touring company. She was old enough to have served her apprenticeship in one of the last of these schools and remembered well the homely, knit-together feeling of back-stage, the feeling that the troupe was a little world of its own, moving compactly about a larger world. With Meyer’s help she had tried, so far as she was able, to keep the same players about her for all her productions. She used to beg Meyer to look for what she called useful actors and actresses, by which she meant adaptable people who could pour themselves into the mould of a part and who did not depend upon individual tricks. “Give me actors, Pooh darling, not types.” Perhaps that was why, with the exception of Valerie Gaynes and Courtney Broadhead, none of her company was very young. Valerie she had suffered only after a struggle, and, she confided in Hambledon, because she was afraid they might all begin to think she was jealous of young and good-looking women. Courtney came of an old acting family and took his work seriously. The rest—Ackroyd, Gascoigne, Liversidge, Vernon, Hambledon, and Susan Max, were all over forty. They were, as Hambledon would have said, “old troupers,” used to each other’s ways, and to the sound of each other’s voices. There is a kind of fortuitous intimacy among the members of such companies. It would be difficult to say how well they really know each other, but they often speak of themselves as “a happy family.” As he looked from one face to another Alleyn was aware of this corporate feeling in the Dacres Company. “How are they taking it?” he wondered. He asked himself the inevitable question: “Which? Which of these?” And one by one he watched them.