The Girl From His Town

Dan put his hand on ducal shoulders and followed the nobleman through the labyrinth of flies.

“Which of ’em do you want to see, old man?”

Dan, without replying, went forward to a small cluster of lights in one of the wings. He went forward intuitively, and his companion caught his arm: “Oh, I say, for God’s sake, don’t go on like this!”

But without response Dan continued his direction. A call page stood before the door, and Dan, on a card over the entrance, read “Miss Lane.” The smell of calcium and paint and perfume and the auxiliaries hung heavy on the air. The other man saw Dan knock, knock again and then go in.

Unannounced Dan Blair opened the door of the dressing-room of the actress. Miss Lane’s dressing-rooms were worth displaying to her intimate friends. They were done with great taste in coral tint. She might have been said to be in a coral cave under the sea, as far as young Blair was concerned. As he came in he felt his ears deaden, and the smoke of cigarettes grew so thick that he looked as through a veil. The dancer was standing in the center of the room, one hand on her hip, and in the other hand a cigarette. Her short skirt stood out around her like a bell, and over the bell fell a rain of pinkish coral strands. She wore a thin silk slip, from which her neck and arms came shining out, and her woman knelt at her feet strapping on a little coral shoe.

Blair shut the door behind him, and began to realize how rude, how impertinent his entrance would be considered. But he came boldly forward and would have introduced himself as “Dan Blair from Blairtown,” but Miss Lane, who stared at the entrance through the smoke, burst into a laugh so bright, so delightful, that he was carried high up on the coral strands to the very beach. She crossed her white arms over her breast and leaned forward, as a saleswoman might lean forward over a counter, and with her beautifully trained voice, all sweetly she asked him:

“Hello, little boy, what will you take?”

Blair giggled, quick to catch her meaning, and answered: “Oh, chocolate, I guess!”

And Letty Lane laughed, put out her white hand, the one without the cigarette, and said: “Haven’t got that brand on board—so sorry! Will a cocktail do? All sorts in bottles. Higgins, fix Mr. Blair a Martini.”

As the dresser rose from her stooping position, the rest of Letty Lane’s dressing-room unfolded out of the mist and smoke. On a sofa covered with lace pillows Blair saw a man sitting, smoking as well. He was tall and had a dark mustache. It was Prince Poniotowsky, whom Dan had already met at the Galorey shoot.

“Prince Poniotowsky,” Miss Lane presented him, “Mr. Blair, of Blairtown, Montana. Say, Frederick, give me my cap, will you? It is over by your side. I’ve got to hustle.”

The man, without moving, picked up a small red cap with a single plume, from the sofa at his side. In another second Letty Lane had placed it on her head of yellow hair, real yellow hair and not a doubt of it, like sunshine—not the color one gets from inside bottles. Her arms, her hands flashed with rings, priceless flashes, and the little spears pricked Dan like sharp needles.

“It’s the nicest ever!” she was saying. “How on earth did you get in here, though? Have you bought the Gaiety Theater? I’m the most exclusive girl on the stage. Who let you in?”

Her accent was English, and even that put her from him. As he looked at her he couldn’t understand how he had ever recognized her. If he had waited for another act he wouldn’t have believed the likeness real. The girl he remembered had both softened and hardened; the round features were gone, but all the angles were gone as well. Her eyes were as gray as the seas; she was painted and her lids were darkened. Seen close, she was not so divine as on the stage, but there was still a more thrilling charm about the fact that she was real.

“To think of any one from Montana being here to-night! Staying very long, Mr. Blair?” Between each sentence she directed Higgins, who was getting her into her bodice. “And how do you like Mandalay? Isn’t it great?”

She addressed herself to Dan, but she smiled on both the men with extreme brilliance.

“You bet your life,” he responded. “I should think it was great.”

Poniotowsky rose indolently. He had not looked toward the new-comer, but had, on the other hand, followed every detail of Miss Lane’s dressing.

“Better take your scarf, Letty. Hand it to Miss Lane,” he directed Higgins. “It is so damned drafty in these beastly wings.”

He drew his watch out, gathered up his long coat, flung it over his arm and picked up his opera hat which lay folded on Letty Lane’s dressing-table.

The call page for the third time summoned “Miss La—ne, Miss La—ane,” and she took the scarf Higgins handed her and ran it through her hands, still beaming on Dan.

“Come in to see me at the Savoy on any day at two-thirty except on matinée days.”

“Put on your scarf.” Poniotowsky, taking it from her hands, laid it across her white shoulders, and she passed out between the two men, light as a bird, smiling, nodding, followed by the prince and the boy from Montana. The crowds began to fill the lately empty wings—dancers, chorus girls with their rustling gowns. Letty Lane said to Dan:

“Guess you’ll like my solo in this act all right—it’s the best thing in Mandalay. Now go along, and clap me hard.”

It gave him a new pleasure, for she had spoken to him in real American fashion with the swift mimicry that showed her talent. Dan went slowly back to his party. As he took his seat by the duchess she said to him:

“You went out to see Letty Lane. Do you know her?”

“Know her!” And as Dan answered, the sound of his own voice was queer to him, and his face flushed hotly. “Lord, yes. She used to be in the drug store in Blairtown. Sold soda-water to me when we were both kids. Whoever would have thought that she had that in her!” He nodded toward the stage, for Letty Lane had come on. “She sang in our church, too, but not for long.”

“Who was with her in her dressing-room?” the duchess asked. Blair didn’t answer. He was looking at Letty Lane. She had come to dance for the rajah and in her arms she held four white doves; each dove had a coral thread around its throat. It was a number that made her famous, The Dove Song. Set free, the birds flew about her, circling her blond head, surmounted by the small coral-colored cap. The doves settled on her shoulders, pecked at her lips.

“Was it Poniotowsky?” the duchess repeated.

And Dan told her a meaningless lie. “I didn’t meet any one there.” And with satisfaction the duchess said:

“Then she has thrown him over, too. He was the latest and the richest. She is horribly extravagant. No man is rich enough for her, they say. Poniotowsky isn’t a gold mine.”

The doves had flown away to the wings and been gathered up by the Indian servants. The actress on the stage began her Indian cradle song. She came, distinctly turning toward the box party. She had never sung like this in London before. There was a freshness in her voice, a quality in her gesture, a pathos and a sweetness that delighted her audience. They fairly clamored for her, waved and called and recalled. Dan stood motionless, his eyes fastened on her, his heart rocked by the song. He didn’t want any one to speak to him. He wished that none of them would breathe, and nearly as absorbed as was he, no one did speak.

CHAPTER V—AT THE CARLTON

There are certain natures to whom each appearance of evil, each form of delinquency is a fresh surprise. They are born simple, in the sweet sense of the word, and they go down to old age never of the world, although in a sense worldly. If Dan Blair’s eyes were somewhat opened at twenty-two, he had yet the bloom on his soul. He was no fool, but his ideals stood up each on its pedestal and ready to appear one by one to him as the scenes of his life shifted and the different curtains rose. He had been trained in finance from his boyhood and he was a born financier. Money was his natural element; he could go far in it. But woman! He was one of those manly creatures—a knight—to whom each woman is a sacred thing: a dove, a crystal-clear soul, made to cherish and to protect, made to be spoiled. And in Dan were all the qualities that go to make up the unselfish, tender, foolish, and often unhappy American husband. These were some of the other things he had inherited from his father. Blair, senior, had married his first love, and whereas his boy had been trained to know money and its value, how to keep it and spend it, to save it and to make it, he had been taught nothing at all about woman. He had never been taught to distrust women, never been warned against them; he had been taught nothing but his father’s memory of his mother, and the result was that he worshiped the sex and wondered at the mystery.

With Gordon Galorey and the others he had ridden, shot better than they, and had played, but with Lady Galorey and the Duchess of Breakwater he was nothing but a child. As far as his hostess was concerned, on several occasions she had put to him certain states of affairs, well, touchingly. Dan had been moved by the stories of sore need among the tenants, had been impressed by the necessity of reforms and rebuildings and on each occasion had given his hostess a check. She had asked him to say nothing about it to Gordon, and he had kept his silence. Dan liked Lady Galorey extremely: she was jolly, witty and friendly. She treated him as a member of the family and made no demands on him, save the ones mentioned.

In the time that he had come to know the Duchess of Breakwater she, on her part, had filled him full of other confidences. Into his young ears she poured the story of her disappointment, her disjointed life, from her worldly girlhood to her disillusion in marriage. She was beautiful when she talked and more lovely when she wept. Dan thought himself in love with the Duchess of Breakwater. His conversations with her had brought him to this conclusion. They had motored from Osdene Park together, and he had been extremely taken with the pleasure of it, and with the fact of their real companionship. Two or three times the words had been on his lips, which were fated not to be spoken then, however, and Dan reached the Gaiety still unfettered, his duchess by his side. And then the orchestra had begun to play Mandalay, the curtain had gone up and Letty Lane had come out on the boards. But her apparition did not strike off his chains immediately, nor did he renounce his plan to tell the duchess the very next day that he loved her.

When with sparkling eyes Lady Galorey raved about Mandalay, Dan listened with eagerness. Everybody seemed to know all about Letty Lane, but he alone knew from what town she had come!

They went for supper at the Carlton after the theater.

“Letty,” Lady Galorey said, “tells it herself how the impresario heard her sing in some country church—picked her up then and there and brought her over here, and they say she married him.”

Dan Blair could have told them how she had sung in that little church that day. Dan was eating his caviare sandwich. “Her name then was Sally Towney,” he murmured. How little he had guessed that she was singing herself right out of that church and into the London Gaiety Theater! Anyway, she had made him “sit up!” It was a far cry from Montana to the London Gaiety. And so she married the greasy Jew who had discovered her!

Dan glanced over at the Duchess of Breakwater. She was looking well, exquisitely high bred, and she impressed him. She leaned slightly over to him, laughing. He had hardly dared to meet her eyes that day, fearing that she might read his secret. She had told him that in her own right she was a countess—the Countess of Stainer. Titles didn’t cut any ice with him. At any rate, she would be able to “buy back the old farm”—that is the way Dan put it. She had told him of the beautiful old Stainer Court, mortgaged and hung up with debts, as deep in ruins as the ivy was thick on the walls.

As Dan looked over at the duchess he saw the other people staring and looking about at a table near. It was spread a little to their left for four people, a great bouquet of orchids in the center.

“There,” Galorey said, “there’s Letty Lane.” And the singer came in, followed by three men, the first of them the Prince Poniotowsky, indolent, bored, haughty, his eye-glass dangling. Miss Lane was dressed in black, a superb costume of faultless cut, and it enfolded her like a shadow; as a shadow might enfold a specter, for the dancer was as pale as the dead. She had neither painted nor rouged, she had evidently employed no coquetry to disguise her fag; rather she seemed to be on the verge of a serious illness, and presented a striking contrast to the brilliant creature, who had shone before their eyes not an hour before. Her dress was a challenge to the more gay and delicate affairs the other women in the restaurant wore. The gown came severely up to her chin. Its high collar closed around with a pearl necklace; from her ears fell pearls, long, creamy and priceless. She wore a great feathered hat, which, drooping, almost hid her small, pale face and her golden hair. She drew off her gloves as she came in and her white, jeweled hands flashed. She looked infinitely tired and extremely bored. As soon as she took her seat at the table intended for her party, Poniotowsky poured her out a glass of champagne, which she drank off as though it were water.

“Gad,” Lord Galorey said, “she is a stunner! What a figure, and what a head, and what daring to dress like that!”

“She knows how to make herself conspicuous,” said the Duchess of Breakwater.

“She looks extremely ill,” said Lady Galorey. “The pace she goes will do her up in a year or two.”

Dan Blair had his back to her, and when they rose to leave he was the last to pass out. Letty Lane saw him, and a light broke over her pallid face. She nodded and smiled and shook her hand in a pretty little salute. If her face was pale, her lips were red, and her smile was like sunlight; and at her recognition a wave of friendly fellowship swept over the young man—a sort of loyal kinship to her which he hadn’t felt for any other woman there, and which he could not have explained. In warm approval of the actress’ distinction, he said softly to himself: “That’s all right—she makes the rest of them look like thirty cents.”

CHAPTER VI—GALOREY SEEKS ADVICE

“Advice,” Dan Blair senior once said to his boy, “is the kind of thing we want some fellow to give us when we ain’t going to do the thing we ought to do, or are a little ashamed of something we have done. It’s an awful good way to get cured of asking advice just to do what the fellow tells you to at once.”

During Ruggles’ stay in London the young fellow looked to it that Ruggles saw the sights, and the two did the principal features of the big town, to the rich enjoyment of the Westerner. Dan took his friend every night to the play, and on the fourth evening Ruggles said: “Let’s go to the circus or a vaudeville, Dan. I have learned this show by heart!” They had been every night to see Mandalay.

“Oh, you go on where you like, Josh,” the boy answered. “I’m going to see how she looks from the pit.”

Ruggles was not a Blairtown man. He had come from farther west, and had never heard anything of Sarah Towney or Letty Lane. He applauded the actress vigorously at the Gaiety at first, and after the third night slept through most of the performance. When he waked up he tried to discover what attraction Letty Lane had for Dan. For the young man never left Ruggles’ side, never went behind the scenes, though he seemed absorbed, as a man usually is absorbed for one reason only.

In response to a telegram from Osdene Park, Dan motored out there one afternoon, and during his absence Ruggles was surprised at his hotel by a call.

“My dear Mr. Ruggles,” Lord Galorey said, for he it was the page boy fetched up, “why don’t you come out to see us? All friends of old Mr. Blair’s are welcome at Osdene.”

Ruggles thanked Galorey and said he was not a visiting man, that he only had a short time in London, and was going to Ireland to look up “his family tree.”

“There are one hundred acres of trees in Osdene,” laughed Galorey; “you can climb them all.” And Ruggles replied:

“I guess I wouldn’t find any O’Shaughnessy Ruggles at the top of any of ’em, my lord. The boy has gone out to see you all to-day.”

Galorey nodded. “That is just why I toddled in to see you!”

Ruggles’ caller had been shown to the sitting-room, where he and Dan hobnobbed and smoked during the Westerner’s visit. There was a pile of papers on the table, in one corner a typewriter covered by a black cloth. Galorey took a chair and, refusing a cigarette, lit his pipe.

“I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting you in the West when I was out there with Blair. I knew Dan’s father rather well.”

Ruggles responded: “I knew him rather well too, for thirty years. If,” he went on, “Blair hadn’t known you pretty well he wouldn’t have sent the boy out to you as he has done. He was keen on every trail. I might say that he had been over every one of ’em like a hound before he set the boy loose.”

Galorey answered, “Quite so,” gravely. “I know it. I knew it when Dan turned up at Osdene—” Holding his pipe bowl in the palm of his slender hand, he smoked meditatively. He hadn’t thought about things, as he had been doing lately, for many years. His sense of honor was the strongest thing in Gordon Galorey, the only thing in him, perhaps, that had been left unsmirched by the touch of the world. He was unquestionably a gentleman.

“Blair, however,” he said, “wasn’t as keen on this scent as you’d expect. His intuition was wrong.”

Ruggles raised his eyebrows slightly.

“I mean to say,” Lord Galorey went on, “that he knew me in the West when I had cut loose for a few blessed months from just these things into which he has sent his boy—from what, if I had a son, God knows I’d throw him as far as I could.”

“Blair wanted Dan to see the world.”

“Of course, that is right enough. We all have to see it, I fancy, but this boy isn’t ready to look at it.”

“He is twenty-two,” Ruggles returned. “When I was his age I was supporting four people.”

Galorey went on: “Osdene Park at present isn’t the window for Blair’s boy to see life through, and that is what I have come up to London to talk to you about, Mr. Ruggles. I should like to have you take him away.”

“What’s Dan been up to down there?”

“Nothing as yet, but he is in the pocket of a woman—he is in a nest of women.”

Ruggles’ broad face had not altered its expression of quiet expectation.

“There’s a lot of ’em down there?” he asked.

“There are two,” Galorey said briefly, “and one of them is my wife.”

Ruggles turned his cigarette between his great fingers. He was a slow thinker. He had none of old Blair’s keenness, but he had other qualities. Galorey saw that he had not been quite understood, and he waited and then said:

“Lady Galorey is like the rest of modern wives, and I am like a lot of modern husbands. We each go our own way. My way is a worthless one, God knows I don’t stand up for it, but it is not my wife’s way in any sense of the word.”

“Does she want Dan to go along on her road?” Ruggles asked. “And how far?”

“We are financially strapped just now,” said Galorey calmly, “and she has got money from the boy.” He didn’t remove his pipe from his mouth; still holding it between his teeth he put his hand in his pocket, took out his wallet, drew forth four checks and laid them down before Ruggles. “It is quite a sum,” Galorey noted, “sufficient to do a lot to Osdene Park in the way of needed repairs.” Ruggles had never seen a smile such as curved his companion’s lips. “But Osdene Park will have to be repaired by money from some other source.”

Ruggles wondered how the husband had got hold of the checks, but he didn’t ask and he did not look at the papers.

“When Dan came to the Park,” said Galorey, “I stopped bridge playing, but this more than takes its place!”

Ruggles’ big hand went slowly toward the checks; he touched them with his fingers and said: “Is Dan in love with your wife?”

And Lord Galorey laughed and said: “Lord no, my dear man, not even that! It is pure good nature on his part—mere prodigality. Edith appealed to him, that’s all.”

Relief crossed Ruggles’ face. He understood in a flash the worldly woman’s appeal to the rich young man and believed the story the husband told him.

“Have you spoken to the boy?”

“My dear chap, I have spoken to him about nothing. I preferred to come to you.”

“You said,” Ruggles continued, “there were two ladies down to your place.”

Galorey had refilled his pipe and held it as before in the palm of his hand.

“I can look after the affairs of my wife, and this shan’t happen again, I promise you—not at Osdene, but I’m afraid I can not do much in the other case. The Duchess of Breakwater has been at Osdene for nearly three weeks, and Dan is in love with her.”

Ruggles put the four checks one on top of the other.

“Is the lady a widow?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“So that’s the nest Dan has got into at Osdene,” the Westerner said. And Galorey answered: “That is the nest.”

“And he has gone out there to-day—got a wire this morning.”

“The duchess has been in an awful funk,” said Galorey, “because Dan’s been stopping in London so long. She sent him a message, and as soon as Dan wired back that he was coming to the Park, I decided to come here and see you.”

Ruggles ruminated: “Has the duchess complications financially?”

“Ra-ther!” the other answered.

And Ruggles turned his broad, honest face full on Galorey: “Do you think she could be bought off?”

Galorey took his pipe out of his mouth.

“It depends on how far Dan has gone on with her. To be frank with you, Mr. Ruggles, it is a case of emotion on the part of the woman. She is really in love with Dan. Gad!” exclaimed the nobleman. “I have been on the point of turning the whole brood out of doors these last days. It was like imprisoning a mountain breeze in a charnel house—a woman with her scars and her experience and that boy—I don’t know where you’ve kept him, or how you kept him as he is, but he is as clear as water. I have talked to him and I know.”

Nothing in Ruggles’ expression had changed until now. His eyes glowed.

“Dan’s all right,” he said softly. “Don’t you worry! He’s all right. I guess his father knew what he was doing, and I’ll bet the whole thing was just what he sent him over here for! Old Dan Blair wasn’t worth a copper when the boy was born, and yet he had ideas about everything and he seemed to know more in that old gray head of his than a whole library of books. Dan’s all right.”

“My dear man,” said the nobleman, “that is just where you Americans are wrong. You comfort yourself with your eternal ‘Dan’s all right,’ and you won’t see the truth. You won’t breathe the word ‘scandal’ and yet you are thick enough in them, God knows. You won’t admit them, but they are there. Now be honest and look at the truth, will you? You are a man of common sense. Dan Blair is not all right. He is in an infernally dangerous position. The Duchess of Breakwater will marry him. It is what she has wanted to do for years, but she has not found a man rich enough, and she will marry this boy offhand.”

“Well,” said the Westerner slowly, “if he loves her and if he marries her—”

“Marries her!” exclaimed the nobleman. “There you are again! Do you think marriage makes it any better? Why, if she went off to the Continent with him for six weeks and then set him free, that would be preferable to marrying her. My dear man,” he said, leaning over the table where Ruggles sat, “if I had a boy I would rather have him marry Letty Lane of the Gaiety. Now you know what I mean.”

Ruggles’ face, which had hardened, relaxed.

“I have seen that lady,” he exclaimed with satisfaction; “I have seen her several times.”

Galorey sank back into his chair and neither man spoke for a few seconds. Turning it all over in his slow mind, Ruggles remembered Dan’s absorption in the last few days. “So there are three women in the nest,” he concluded thoughtfully, and Gordon Galorey repeated:

“No, not three. What do you mean?”

“Your wife”—Ruggles held up one finger and Galorey interrupted him to murmur:

“I’ll take care of Edith.”

“The Duchess of Breakwater you think won’t talk of money?”

“No, don’t count on it. She is aiming at ten million pounds.”

Ruggles was holding up the second finger.

“Well, I guess Dan has gone out to take care of her to-day.”

Dan and Ruggles had seen Mandalay from a box, from the pit and from the stalls. On the table lay a book of the opera. While talking with Galorey, Ruggles had unconsciously arranged the checks on top of the libretto of Mandalay.

“I’ll take care of Miss Lane,” Ruggles said at length.

His lordship echoed, “Miss Lane?” and looked up in surprise. “What Miss Lane, for God’s sake?”

“Miss Letty Lane at the Gaiety,” Ruggles answered.

“Why, she isn’t in the question, my dear man.”

“You put her there just now yourself.”

“Bosh!” Galorey exclaimed impatiently, “I spoke of her as being the limit, the last thing on the line.”

“No,” corrected the other, “you put the Duchess of Breakwater as the limit.”

Galorey smiled frankly. “You are right, my dear chap,” he accepted, “and I stand by it.”

A page boy knocked at the door and came in holding out on a salver a card for Mr. Ruggles, and at the interruption Galorey rose and invited Ruggles to go out with him that night to Osdene. “Lady Galorey will be delighted.”

But Ruggles shook his head. “The boy is coming back here to-night,” and Galorey laughed.

“Don’t you believe it! You don’t know how deep in he is. You don’t know the Duchess of Breakwater. Once he is with her—”

At the same time that the page boy handed Mr. Ruggles the card of the caller, he gave him as well a small envelope, which contained box tickets for the Gaiety. Ruggles examined it.

“I have got some writing to do,” he told Galorey, “and I’m going to see a show to-night, and I think I’ll just stay here and watch my hole.”

As soon as Galorey had left the Carlton, Mr. Ruggles despatched his letters and his visitor, made a very careful toilet, and after waiting until past eight o’clock for Dan to return to dinner, dined alone on roast beef and a tart, and with perfect digestion, if somewhat thoughtful mind, left the hotel and walked down the dim street to the brilliant Strand, and on foot to the Gaiety.

CHAPTER VII—AT THE STAGE ENTRANCE

Ruggles, from his stall, for the fourth time saw the curtain go up on Mandalay and heard the temple bells ring. One of the stage boxes was not occupied until after the first act and then the son of his friend came in alone and sat far back out of sight of any eyes but the keenest, and those eyes were Ruggles’. Letty Lane, delicious, fantastic, languishing, sang to Dan; that was evident to Ruggles. He was a large man and filled his stall comfortably. He sat through the performance peacefully, his hands in his pockets, his big face thoughtful, his shirt front ruffled. To look at him, one must have wondered why he had come to Mandalay. He scarcely lost any of the threads of his own reflections, though when Miss Lane, in response to a call from the house, sang her cradle song three times, he seemed moved. The tones of her pure voice, the cradling in her arms of an imaginary child, her apparent dovelike purity, her grace and sweetness, and her cooing, gentle tone, to judge by the softening of the Westerner’s face, touched very much the big fellow who listened like a child. At the end he drew his handkerchief slowly across his eyes, but the tears, or rather moisture, that rose there was not all due to Miss Lane’s song, for Ruggles was extremely warm.

He could see that in his box the boy sat transfixed and absorbed. Dan went out in the second entr’acte and was absent when the curtain went down. Ruggles, as well, left before the performance was over, to make his way outside the theater to the stage exit, where there was already gathered a little group, looked after by a couple of policemen. Close to the curb a gleaming motor waited, the footman at its door. Ruggles buttoned his coat up to his chin and took his place close to the door, over which the electric light showed the words “Stage Entrance.” A poor woman elbowed him, her shabby hat adorned by a scraggly plume, a gray shawl wrapped round her shoulders. A girl or two, who might have been flower sellers in Piccadilly in the daytime, a couple of toughs, a handful of other vagrants smelling of gin, a decent man in working clothes, a child in his arms, formed the human hedge Letty Lane was to pass between—a singular group of people to spend an hour hanging about the streets at the exit of a theater well toward midnight. So the naïve Ruggles thought, and better understood the appearance of the young fellows in evening clothes who hovered on the extreme edge of the little crowd. Dan, however, was not of these.

“Look sharp, Cissy,” the workingman spoke to his child, holding her well up. “When she comes hout she’ll pass close to yer, and you sing hout, ‘God bless yer.’”

“Yes, Dad, I will,” shrilled the child.

The woman in the gray shawl drew it close about her. “Aw she’s a true lidy, all right, ain’t she? I expect you’ve had some kindness off her as well?”

The man nodded over the child’s shoulder. “Used to be a scene shifter, and Miss Lane found out about my little girl last year—not this lass, not Cissy, Cissy’s sister—and she sent ’er to a place where it costs the eyes out of yer head. She’s gettin’ well fast, and we, none of us, has seen her or spoken to Miss Lane. She doesn’t know our names.”

And the woman answered: “She does a lot like that. She’s got a heart bigger’n her little body.”

And a big boy in the front row said back to the others: “Well, she makes a mint of money.”

And the woman who had spoken before said: “She gives it nearly all to the poor.”

Ruggles was evidently on the poor side of the waiting crowd; the handful of riffraff around him with its stench of dirt and gin. A better looking set collected opposite and there was the gleam of white shirt fronts.

“Now, there she comes,” the father saw her first. “Sing out, Cissy.”

The door opened and a figure quickly floated from it, like a white rose blown out into the foggy darkness. It floated down the few steps to the street between the double row of spectators. A white cloak entirely covered the actress. Her head was hidden by a white scarf, and she almost ran the short gantlet to her motor, between the cries of “God bless you!”—“Three cheers for Letty Lane”—“God bless you, lady!” She didn’t speak or heed, however, or turn her head, but held her scarf against her face, and the man who slowly lounged behind her to the car, and put her in and got in after her, was not the man Joshua Ruggles had waited there to see. He hung about until the footman had sprung up and the car moved softly away, the stage entrance door shut, then he followed along with the crowd, with the few faithful ones who had waited an hour in the cold mist to cry out their applause, not to a singer in Mandalay but to a woman’s heart.

CHAPTER VIII—DAN’S SIMPLICITY

She had ordered tea in her sitting-room. She told him that he looked frightfully seedy, asked him what he had been doing and why he had stopped so long away, and Blair told her that old Ruggles, his father’s friend, had run over to see him with a lot of papers for Dan to read and sign and closed with a smile, telling her that he guessed she “didn’t know much about business.”

“I only know the horrid things of business—debts, and loans, and bills, and fussing.”

“Those things are not business,” Dan answered wisely; “they are just common or garden carelessness.”

She asked him why he had not brought Ruggles out to Osdene, and he told her he couldn’t have done a stroke of work with the old boy down here at the Park.

Stirring his tea, he appreciated the duchess. The agreeable picture she made impressed him mightily.

“Do you know,” he asked suddenly, “what you make me think of?”

And she responded softly: “No, dear.”

“A box of candy. This room with its stuffed walls, and you in it are good enough—”

“To eat?” she laughed aloud. “Oh, you perfectly killing creature, what an idea!”

And as he met her eyes with his clear ones, with a simplicity she could never hope to reach, he put his tea-cup down; and as he did so the duchess observed his strong hands, their vigor, well-kept and muscular, but not the dandified hands of the man who goes often to the manicure.

“If it hadn’t been for one thing,” the boy went on, “I would have thought of nothing else but you, every minute I’ve been away.”

“Mr. Ruggles?” suggested the duchess.

“No, the Gaiety girl, Letty Lane. You know I told you in the box that she was from my town.”

The young man, who had flown back to Osdene Park in answer to a telegram, began to take his companion into his confidence.

“I knew that girl,” Dan said, “when she wasn’t more than fourteen. She sold me soda-water over the drug store counter. I always thought she was bully, bright as a button and pretty as a peach. Once, I remember, I took six chocolate sodas in one day just to go in and see her. I had an awful time. I most died of that jag, and yet,” he said meditatively, “I don’t think I ever spoke three words to her, just said ‘sarsaparilla’ or ‘chocolate’ or whatever it might happen to be. Ever since that day, ever since that jag,” he said with feeling, “I couldn’t see a stick of chocolate and keep my head up! Well,” went on the boy, “Sarah Towney sang in our church for a missionary meeting, and I was there. I can remember the song she sang.” He spoke with unconscious ardor. He didn’t refer to the hymn, however, but went on with his narrative. “She disappeared from Blairtown. I never had a peep at her again until the other night. Gosh!” he said fervently, “when I saw her there on the stage, why, I felt as though cold water was running up and down my spine.”

The duchess, as a rule, was amused by his slang. It seemed vulgar to her now.

“Heavens,” she drawled, “you are really too dreadful!”

He didn’t seem to hear her.

“She’s turned out a perfect wonder, hasn’t she? A world-beater! Why, everybody tells me there isn’t another like her in her specialty. Of course I have heard of Letty Lane, but I haven’t been out to things since I went in mourning, and I’ve never run up against her.”

“Really,” drawled the duchess again, “now that you have ‘run up against her’ what are you going to do with her? Marry her?”

His honest stare was the greatest relief she had ever experienced. He repeated bluntly: “Marry her? Why the dickens should I?”

“You seem absorbed in her.”

He agreed with her. “I am. I think she’s great, don’t you?”

“Hardly.”

But the cold voice of the duchess did not chill him. “Simply great,” he continued, “and I’m sorry for her down to the ground. That is what is the matter. Didn’t you notice her when she came into the Carlton that night?”

“What of it, silly? I thought she looked as thin as a shad in that black dress, and the way Poniotowsky goes about with her proves what an ass he is.”

“Well, I hate him,” Blair simply stated; “I would wring his neck for twenty cents. But she’s very ill; that is what is the matter with her.”

“They all look like that off the stage,” the duchess assured indifferently. “They are nothing but footlight beauties: they look ghastly off the boards. I dare say that Letty Lane is ill, though; the pace she goes would kill anybody. Have some more tea?”

He held out his cup and agreed with her.

“She works too hard—this playing almost every night, singing and dancing twice at the matinées, I should think she would be dead.”

“Oh, I don’t mean her professional engagements,” murmured the duchess.

A revolt such as had stung him when they criticized her at the Carlton rose in him now.

“It is hard to believe,” he said, “when you hear her sing that dove song and that cradle song.”

But his companion’s laugh stopped his championship short.

“You dear boy, don’t be a silly, Dan. She doesn’t need your pity or your good opinion. She is perfectly satisfied. She has got a fortune in Poniotowsky, and she really is ‘a perfect terror,’ you know.”

Affected slightly by her cold dismissal of his subject, he paused for a moment. But his own point of view was too strong to be shaken by this woman’s light words.

“I suppose if she wasn’t from my town—” At his words the vision of Letty Lane with the coral strands on her dress, came before his eyes, and he said honestly: “But I do take an interest in her just the same, and she’s going to pieces, that’s clear. Something ought to be done.”

The Duchess of Breakwater was very much annoyed.

“Are you going to talk about her all the time?” she asked with sharp sweetness. “You are not very flattering, Dan.”

And he returned peacefully, “Why, I thought you might be able to help her in some way or another.”

“Me!” She laughed aloud. “Me help Letty Lane? Really—”

“Why, you might get her to sing out here,” he suggested. “That would sort of get hold of her; women know how to do those things.”

His preposterous simplicity overwhelmed her. She stirred her tea, and said, controlling herself, “Why, what on earth would you have me to say to Letty Lane?”

“Oh, just be nice to her,” he suggested. “Tell her to take care of herself and to brace up. Get some nice woman to—”

The duchess helped him. “To reform her?”

“Do her good,” the boy said gently.

“You’re too silly for words. If you were not such a hopeless child I would be furious with you. Why, my dear boy, she would laugh in your face and in mine.”

As the duchess left the tea-table she repeated: “Is this what you came up from London to talk to me about?”

And at the touch of her dress as she passed him—at the look she gave him from her eyes, Dan flushed and said honestly: “Why, I told you that she was the only thing that kept me from thinking about you all the time.”

CHAPTER IX—DISAPPOINTMENT

Dan Blair had not been back of the scenes at the Gaiety since his first call on the singer. Indeed, though he had told the duchess he pitied Miss Lane, he had not been able to approach her very closely, even in his own thoughts. When she first appeared on his horizon his mind was full of the Duchess of Breakwater, and the singer had only hovered round his more profound feelings for another woman. But Letty Lane was an atmosphere in Dan’s mind which he was not yet able to understand. There was so little left that was connected with his old home, certainly nothing in the British Isles, excepting Ruggles, and to the young man everything from America had its value. Decidedly the nice girl of whom he had spoken to Gordon Galorey, the print-frocked, sun-bonneted type, the ideal girl that Dan would like to marry and to spoil, had not crossed his path. The Duchess of Breakwater did not suggest her, nor did any of the London beauties. Dan’s first ideal was beginning to fade.

He left Osdene Park on protest and returned the same night to London, and all the way back to town tried to register in his mind, unused to analysis, his experience with the Duchess of Breakwater on this last visit.

He had experienced his first disappointment in the sex, and this disappointment had been of an unusual kind. It was not that he had been turned down or given the mitten, but he had seen one woman turn another down. A woman had been mean, so he put it, and the fact that the Duchess of Breakwater had refused to lend a moral hand to the singer at the Gaiety hurt Dan’s feelings. Then, as soon as his enthusiasm had calmed, he saw what a stupid ass he had been. A duchess couldn’t mix up with a comic opera singer, of course. Still, he mused, “she might have been a little nicer about it.”

The education his father had given him about women, the slender information he had about them, was put to the test now; the girl he had dreamed of, “the nice girl,” well, she would have had a tenderer way with her in a case such as this! Back of Dan’s hurt feelings, there was a great deal on the Duchess of Breakwater’s side. She had not done for herself yet. She hadn’t fetched him nearly up to the altar for nothing, and back of his disapproval, there was a long list of admirations and looks, memories of many tête-à-têtes and of more fervent kisses which scored a good deal in the favor of Dan’s first woman. The Duchess of Breakwater had gone boldly on with Dan’s unfinished education, and he really thought he loved her, and that he was in honor bound to see the thing through.

That evening, once more in the box he had taken all to himself, he listened to Mandalay, carried away with the charm of the music and carried away by the singer. He was in the box nearest the stage and seemed close to her, and he imagined that under her paint he could see her pallor and how thin she was. Nothing, however, in her acting or in her voice revealed the least fatigue. Blair had obtained a card of entrance to the theater, which permitted him to circulate freely behind the scenes, and although as yet the run of his visits had not been clear, this night he had a purpose. Dan stood not far from the corridor that led to Letty Lane’s room, and saw her after her act hurriedly cross the stage, a big white shawl wrapping her slender form closely. She was as thin as a candle. Her woman Higgins followed closely after her, and as they passed Dan, Letty Lane called to him gaily:

“Hello, you! What are you hanging around here for?”

And Dan returned: “Don’t stand here in the draft. It is beastly cold.”

“Yes, Miss,” her woman urged, “don’t stand here.”

But the actress waited nevertheless and said to Dan: “Who’s the girl?”

“What girl?”

“Why, the girl you come here every night to see and are too shy to speak to. Everybody is crazy to know.”

Letty Lane looked like a little girl herself in the crocheted garment her small hands held across her breast. Dan put his arm on her shoulder without realizing the familiarity of his gesture:

“Get out of this draft—get out of it quick, I say,” and pushed her toward her room.

“Gracious, but you are strong.” She felt the muscular touch, and his hand flat against her shoulder was warm through the wool.

“I wish you were strong. You work too darned hard.”

Her head was covered with the coral cap and feather. Dan saw her billowy skirt, her silken hose, her little coral shoes. She fluttered at the door which Higgins opened.

“Why haven’t you been to see me?” she asked him. “You are not very polite.”

“I am coming in now.”

“Not a bit of it. I’m too busy, and it is a short entr’acte. Go and see the girl you came here to see.”

Dan thought that the reason she forbade him to come in was because Prince Poniotowsky waited for her in her dressing-room. It was his first jealous moment, and the feeling fell on him with a swoop, and its fangs fastened in him with a stinging pain. He stammered:

“I didn’t come to see any girl here but you. I came to see you.”

“Come to-morrow at two, at the Savoy.”

But before Dan realized his own precipitation, he had seized the door-handle as Letty Lane went within and was about to close her room against him, and said quickly:

“I’m coming right in now.”

“Why, I never heard of such a thing,” she answered sharply, angrily; “you must be crazy! Take away your hand!” And hers, as well as his, seized the handle of the door. Her small ice-cold hand brought him to his senses.

“I beg your pardon,” he murmured confusedly. “Do go in and get warm if you can.”

But instead of obeying, now that the rude young man withdrew his importuning, Miss Lane’s hands fell from the knob, and close to his eyes she swayed before him, and Dan caught her in his arms—went into her room, carrying her. He had been wrong about Prince Poniotowsky; save for Higgins, the room was empty. The woman, though she exclaimed, showed no great surprise and seemed prepared for such a fainting spell. Dan laid the actress on the sofa and then the dresser said to him:

“Please go, sir; I can quite manage. She has these turns often. I’ll give her brandy. She will be quite right.”

But Dan hesitated, looking at the bit of humanity that he had laid with great gentleness on the divan covered with pillows. Letty Lane lay there, small as a little child, inanimate as death. It was hard to think the quiet little form could contain such life, fire and motion, or that this senseless little creature held London with her voice and grace. Higgins knelt down by Letty Lane’s side, quiet, capable, going about the business of resuscitating her lady much as she laced the singer’s bodice and shoes. “If you would be so good as to open the door, sir, and send me a call page. They’ll have to linger out this entr’acte or put on some feature.”

“But,” exclaimed Blair, “she can’t go back to-night?”

“Lord, yes,” Higgins returned. “Here, Miss Lane; drink this.”

At the door where he paused, Dan saw the girl lifted up, saw her lean on Higgins’ shoulder, and assured then that she was not lifeless in good truth, he went out to do as Higgins had asked him. In a quarter of an hour the curtain rose and within half an hour Dan, from his box, saw the actress dance to the rajah her charming polka to the strains of the Hungarian Band.

CHAPTER X—THE BOY FROM MY TOWN

“I doubt if she does, even in her grave,” returned Higgins. “She is too full of motion. She is like the little girl in the fairy book that danced in her grave.”

Dan didn’t like this comparison.

“Can’t you make her hold up a little?”

Higgins smiled and shook her head.

Letty Lane’s sitting-room was as full of roses as a flower garden. There were quantities of theatrical photographs in silver and leather frames on the tables and the piano. Signed portraits from crowned heads; pictures of well-known worldly men and women whom the dancer had charmed. But a full-length picture of Letty Lane herself in one of the dresses of Mandalay lay on the table near Dan, and he picked it up. She smiled at him enchantingly from the cardboard, across which was written in her big, dashing hand: “For the Boy from my Town. Letty Lane.”

Dan glanced up at Mrs. Higgins.

“Why, that looks as though this were for me.”

The dressing woman nodded. “Miss Lane thought she would be able to see you to-day.”

The picture in his hand, Dan gazed at it rapturously.

“I’m from Blairtown, Montana, where she came from.”

“So she told me, sir.”

He laid the picture back on the table, and Higgins understood that he wanted Miss Lane to give it to him herself. She led him affably to the door and affably smiled upon him. She had a frill in her hand, a thimble on her finger, and a lot of needles in her bodice. She looked motherly and useful. Blair liked to think of her with Letty Lane. He put his hand in his pocket, but she saw his gesture and reproved him quietly: “No, no, sir, please, I never do. I am just as much obliged,” and her face remained so affable that Blair was not embarrassed by her refusal. His parting words were:

“Now, you make her take care of herself.”

And to please him, as she opened the door, she pleasantly assured him that she would do her very best.

Dan went out of the Savoy feeling that he had left something of himself behind him in the motley room of an actress with its perfumed atmosphere of roses and violets. The photograph which he had laid down on the table seemed to look out at him again, and he repeated delightedly, “That one was for me, all right! I’m the ‘boy from her town’ and no mistake.” And he thought of her as she had lain, lifelessly and pale on the dressing-room sofa, under the touch of hired hands, and how, no doubt, she had been lying in her room when he called to-day, with shades drawn, resting before the long hard evening, when London would be amused by her, delighted by her, charmed by her voice, by her body and her grace. He had wandered up as far as Piccadilly, went into a florist’s and stood before the flowers. Her sitting-room had been full of roses, but Dan chose something else that had caught his eye from the window,—a huge country basket of primroses, smelling of the earth and the spring. He sent them with his card and wrote on it, “To the Girl from My Town,” and sent the gift with a pleasure as young and as fresh as was his own heart.

He got no note of acknowledgment from his flowers. Miss Lane was evidently better and played every night; no mention was made of her indisposition in the papers. But Dan couldn’t go to the Gaiety or bear to see her make the effort which he knew must tire her beyond words to conceive.

After a few days he called at the Savoy to get news of her. He got as far as the lift when going up in it he saw Prince Poniotowsky. The sight affected Miss Lane’s townsman so forcibly that instead of going up to the dancer’s apartment Dan took himself off, and anger, displeasure and something like disgust were the only sentiments he carried away from the Savoy. He sent her no flowers, and gave himself up unreservedly to Joshua Ruggles and to a couple of men who came in to see him by appointment. And when toward four o’clock he found himself alone with Ruggles, Dan threw himself down in a big chair and looked intensely bored.