What The Wardrobe Contained
On the Saturday afternoon Wren returned to the Theatre Royal. The stage was dark; the matinée had been cancelled in consequence of a small fire in the flies, which had obliged the management to postpone all performances for forty-eight hours while the insurance men picked over the damage. The coincidence of the fire with Wren's investigation had not been lost on him. He had asked Mr. Cleaver, as he came in at the stage-door, whether the fire had been an accident. Mr. Cleaver had answered that it had been caused, as nearly as could be determined, by a gas-jet left burning in one of the dressing-rooms, and that it was nothing, and that it had not burnt anything of consequence. But Mr. Cleaver had not quite met his eye on the word *consequence*, and Wren had let it pass.
He went up to the wardrobe, which was on the second floor at the back of the building, above the principals' dressing-rooms. The wardrobe-mistress was a Mrs. Tallow, a widow of sixty, who had been with the theatre since before the destruction by fire in 1856 and remembered both it and the building before it. She received Wren in a tiny sitting-room she had made for herself in a corner of the costume-room, furnished with a chair, a kettle on a spirit-lamp, and a portrait in oils of her late husband, who had been a dresser.
"The costume-trunks," said Wren. "Miss Latham's and the others'."
"There is no trunk to