The Girl From His Town

CHAPTER XXI—RUGGLES RETURNS

Ruggles had the breakfast card in his hand, which the waiter had brought in, and Dan, taking it from his friend, ordered a big breakfast.

“I’m as hungry as the dickens, Rug, and I guess you are, too.”

“What was the matter with the duchess?” Ruggles asked. “Were you too young for her, or not rich enough?”

Significantly the boy answered: “One too many, Josh,” and Ruggles winced at the response.

“Here are the fellows with my trunks and things,” he announced as the porters came in with his luggage. “Just drop them there, boys; they’re going to fix some kind of a room later.”

Blair’s long silk-lined coat lay on a chair where he had flung it, his hat beside it, and Ruggles went over to the corner and lifted up a fragrant glove. It was one of Letty Lane’s gloves which Dan had found in the motor and taken possession of. The young man had gone to his dressing-room and begun running his bath, and Ruggles, laying the glove on the table, said to himself:

“I knew he would get rid of the duchess, all right.”

But when Dan came back into the room later in his dressing-gown for breakfast, Ruggles said:

“You’ll have to send her back her glove, Dannie.”

At the sight of it beside the breakfast tray, Dan blushed scarlet. He picked up the fragrant object.

“That’s all right; I’ll take care of it.”

“Is Mandalay running the same as ever?” Ruggles asked over his bacon and eggs.

“Same as ever.”

Ruggles saw he had not returned in vain, and that he was destined to take up his part of the business just as he had laid it out for himself to Lord Galorey. “It’s up to me now: I’ll have to take care of the actress, and I’m darned if I haven’t got a job. If Dan colors up like that at the sight of her glove, I wonder what he does when he holds her hand!”

CHAPTER XXII—WHAT WILL YOU TAKE?

“Oh, I say! You’re not going out, are you?”

In the lapel of her close little coat was a flower he had given her. He wanted to lean forward and kiss it as it rested there. She assured him:

“I have just come in; had an early lunch and took a long walk—think of it! I haven’t taken a walk alone since I can remember!”

Her walk had given her only the ghost of a flush, which rose over her delicate skin, fading away like a furling flag. Her frailness, her slenderness, the air of good-breeding her dress gave her, added to Dan’s deepening emotions. She seemed infinitely dear, and a thing to be protected and fostered.

“Can’t you sit down for a minute? I’ve come to make you a real call.”

“Of course,” she laughed. “But, first, I must answer this letter.”

His jealousy rose and he caught hold of her hand that held the envelope. “Look here, you are not to write it if it is to that damned scoundrel. I took you away from him last night and you are never to see him again.”

For the first time the two really looked at each other. Her lips parted as though she would reprove him, and the boy murmured:

“That’s all right. I mean what I say—never to see him again! Will you promise me? Promise me—I can’t bear it! I won’t have it!”

A film of emotion crossed his clear young eyes and her slender hands were held fast in his clasp. His face was beautiful in its tenderness and in a righteous anger as he bent it on her. Instead of reproving him as she had done before, instead of snatching away her hands, she swayed, and at the sight of her weakness his eyes cleared, and the film lifted like a curtain. She was not fainting, but, as her face turned toward his, he saw it transformed, and Dan caught her in her dark dress, the flowers in her bodice, to his heart. He held her as if he had snatched her from a wreck and in a safe embrace lifted her high to the shore of a coral strand. He kissed her, first timidly, wonderingly, with the sacrament of first love on his lips. Then he kissed her as his heart bade him, and when he set her free she was crying, but the tears on his face were not all her tears.

“Little boy, how crazy, how perfectly crazy! Oh, Dan—Dan!”

She clung to him, looking up at him just as his boy-dreams had told him a girl would look some day. Her face was suffused and softened, her lips—her coral-red, fine, lovely lips were trembling, and her eyes were as gray, as profound as those seas his imagination had longed to explore. Made poet for the first time in his life, as his arms were around her, he whispered: “You are all my dreams come true. If any man comes near you I’ll kill him just as sure as fate. I’ll kill him!”

“Hush, hush! I told you you were crazy. We’re both perfectly mad. I have tried my best not to come to this with you. What would your father say? Let me go, let me go; I’ll call Higgins.”

The boy laughed aloud, the laugh of happy youth. He held her so close that she might as well have tried to loose herself from an iron image of the Spanish Inquisition as from his young arms. This slender, delicious, willowy thing he held was Letty Lane, the adored star London went mad over: the triumph of it! It flashed through him as his pulses beat and his heart was high with the conquest, but it was to the woman only that he whispered:

“I’ve said a lot of stuff and I am likely to say a lot more, but I want you to say something to me. Don’t you love me?”

The word on his lips to him was as strange, as wonderful, as though it had been made for him.

“I guess I must love you, Dan. I guess I must have for a long time.”

“God, I’m so glad! How long?”

“Why, ever since you used to come to the soda-fountain and ask for chocolate. You don’t know how sweet you were when you were a little boy.”

She put her slender hand against his hot cheek. “And you are nothing but a little boy now! I think I must be crazy!”

As he protested, as she listened intently to what his emotion taught him to say to her, she whispered close to his ear:

“What will you take, little boy?”

And he answered: “I’ll take you—you!”

At a slight sound in the next room Letty Lane started as though the interruption really brought her to her senses, put her hand to her disheveled hair, and before she could prevent it, Dan had called Mrs Higgins to “come in,” and the woman, in response, came into the sitting-room. The boy went up to her and took her hands eagerly, and said:

“It’s all right, all right, Mrs. Higgins. Just think of it! She belongs to me!”

“Oh, don’t be a perfect lunatic, Dan,” the actress exclaimed, half laughing, half crying, “and don’t listen to him, Higgins. He’s just crazy.”

But the old woman’s eyes went bright at the boy’s face and tone. “I never was so glad of anything in my life.”

“As of what?” asked her mistress sharply, and the tone was so cold and so suddenly altered that Dan felt a chill of despair.

“Why, at what Mr. Blair says, Miss.”

“Then,” said her mistress, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself. He’s only twenty-two, he doesn’t know anything about life. You must be crazy. He’s as mad as a March hare and he ought to be in school.”

Then, to their consternation, she burst into a passion of weeping; threw herself on Higgins’ breast and begged her to send Dan away—to send everybody away—and to let her die in peace.

In utter despair the boy obeyed the dresser’s motion to go, and his transport was changed into anxiety and dread. He hung about down-stairs in the Savoy for the rest of the afternoon, finally sending up to Higgins for news in sheer desperation, and the page fetched Blair a note in Letty Lane’s own hand. His eyes blurred so as he opened the sheet, he could hardly read the scrawl which said:

“It was perfectly sweet of you to wait down there. I’m all right—just tired out! Better get on a boat and go to Greenland’s Icy Mountains and cool off. But if you don’t, come in to-morrow and have lunch with me.

Letty.”

CHAPTER XXIII—IN THE SUNSET GLOW

He lived through a week of bliss and of torture. One minute she promised to marry him, give up the stage, go around the world on a yacht, whose luxuries, Dan planned, should rival any boat ever built, or they would motor across Asia and see, one by one, the various coral strands and the golden sands of the East. He could not find terms to express how he would spend upon her this fortune of his, which, for the first time, began to have value in his eyes. Money had been lavished on her, still she seemed dazzled. Then she would push it all away from her in disgust—tell him she was sick of everything—that she didn’t want any new jewels or any new clothes, and that she never wanted to see the stage again or any place again; that there was nowhere she wanted to go, nothing she wanted to see—that he must get some fresh girl to whom he could show life, not one whom he must try to make forget it. Then, again, she would say that she loved the stage and her art—wouldn’t give it up for any one in the world—that it was fatal to marry an actress—that it was mad for him to think of marrying her, anyway—that she didn’t want to marry any one and be tied down—that she wanted to be her own mistress and free.

He found her a creature of a thousand whims and caprices, quick to cry, quick to laugh, divine in everything she did. He never knew what she would want him to do next, or how her mood would change, and after one of their happiest hours, when she had been like a girl with him, she would burst into tears, beg him to leave the room, telling him that she was tired—tired—tired, and wanted to go to sleep and never to wake up again. Between them was the figure of Poniotowsky, though neither spoke of him. She appeared to have forgotten him. Dan would rather have cut out his tongue than to speak his name, and yet he was there in the mind of each. During the fortnight Dan spent thousands of pounds on her, bought her jewels which she alternately raved over or but half looked at. He had made his arrangements with Galorey peacefully, coolly and between the two men it had been understood that the world should think the engagement broken by the duchess, and Dan’s attention to Letty Lane, already the subject of much comment, already conspicuous, was enough to justify any woman in taking offense.

One day, the pearl of warm May days, when England even in springtime touches summer, Blair was so happy as to persuade his sweetheart to go with him for a little row on the river. The young fellow waited for her in the boat he had secured, and she, motoring out with Higgins, had appeared, running down to the edge of the water like a girl, gay as a child let out from school, in a simple frock, in a marvelously fetching hat, white gloves, white parasol, white shoes, and as Dan helped her into the boat, pushed it out, pushed away with her on the crest of the sun-flecked waters, spring was in his heart, and he found the moment almost too great to bear.

The actress had been a girl with him all day, giving herself to his moods, doing what he liked without demur, talking of their mutual past, telling him one amusing story after another, proving herself an ideal companion, fresh, varied, reposeful; and no one to have seen Letty Lane with the boy on that afternoon would have dreamed that she ever had known another love. They had moored their boat down near Maidenhead, and he had helped her up the bank to the little inn, where tea had been made for them, and served to him by her own beautiful white hands. He had called for strawberries, and, like a shepherd in a pastoral, had fed them to her, and as they lingered the sunset came creeping steadily in through the windows where they sat.

As they neither called for their account nor to have the tea things taken away, after a while the woman stealthily opened the door and, unknown, looked at one of the prettiest pictures ever within her walls. Letty Lane sat on the window-seat, her golden head, her white form against the glow, and the boy by her side had his arms around her, and her head was on his breast. They were both young. They might have been white birds blown in there, nesting in the humble inn, and the woman of the house, who had not heard the waters of the Thames flow softly for nothing, judged them gently and sighed with pleasure as she shut the door.

Here at Maidenhead Dan had left his boat and the motor took them back. Nothing spoiled his bliss that day, and he said her name a thousand times that night in his dreams. Jealousies—and, when he would let himself think, they were not one, they were many—faded away. The duties that a life with her would involve did not disturb him. For many a long year, come what might, be what would, he would recall the glowing of that sunset reflected under the inn windows, the singing of the thrushes and the flash of the white dress and the fine little white shoes which he had held in the palm of his ardent hand, which he had kissed, as he told her with all his heart that she should rest her tired feet for ever.

There grew in him that day a reverence for her, determined as he was to bring into her life by his wealth and devotion everything of good. His loving plans for her forming in his brain somewhat chaotic and very much fevered, brought him nearer than he had ever been before to the picture of his mother. His father it wasn’t easy for Dan to think of in connection with the actress. He didn’t dare to dwell on the subject, but he had never known his mother, and that pale ideal he could create as he would. In thinking of her he saw only tenderness for Letty Lane—only love; and in his room the night after the row on the river, the night after the long idyl in the sunset-room of the inn, something like a prayer came to his young lips, and, when its short form was finished, a smile brought it to an end as he remembered the line in Letty Lane’s own opera:

    “She  will  teach  you  how  to  pray  in  an  Eastern  form  of  prayer.”

The ring he had given the Duchess of Breakwater had been her own choice, a ruby. He had asked her, through Galorey, to keep it and to wear it later, when she could think of him kindly, in an ornament of some kind or another. The duchess had not refused. The ring he bought for Letty Lane, although there was no engagement announced between them, was the largest, purest diamond he could with decency ask her to put on her hand! It sparkled like a great drop of clear water from some fountain on a magic continent. In another shop strands of pink coral set through with diamonds caught his fancy and he bought her yards of them, ropes of them, smiling to think how his boyhood’s dreams were come true.

He never saw Ruggles except at meals, hardly spoke to the poor man at all, and the boy’s absorbed face, his state of mind, made the older man feel like death. He repeated to himself that he was too late—too late, and usually wound up his reflections by ejaculating:

“Gosh almighty, I’m glad I haven’t got a son!”

CHAPTER XXIV—RUGGLES’ OFFER

Ruggles held an unlighted cigar between his fingers and goose-flesh rose all over him. His glasses bothered him. He couldn’t get them bright enough, though he polished them half a dozen times on his silk handkerchief. His clothes felt too large. He seemed to have shrunken. He moistened his lips, cleared his throat, tried to remember what kind of fellow he had been at Dan’s age. At Dan’s age he was selling a suspender patent on the road, supporting his mother and his sisters—hard work and few temptations; he was too tired and too poor.

Miss Lane kept him waiting ten minutes, and they were hours to her guest. He was afraid every minute that Dan would come in. The thoughts he had gathered together, the plan of action, disarranged itself in his mind every time he thought of the actress. He couldn’t forget his vision of her on the stage or at the Carlton, where she had sat opposite them and bewitched them both. When she came into the sitting-room at length, he started so violently that he knocked over a vase of flowers, the water trickling all over the table down on to the floor.

She had dazzled him before the footlights, charmed him at dinner, and it was singular to think that he knew how this dignified, quiet creature looked in ballet clothes and in a dinner dress, whose frankness had made him catch his breath. It was a third woman who stood before Ruggles now. He had to take her into consideration. She had expected him, saw him by appointment. She was a woman of mind and intelligence. She had not climbed to her starry position without having acquired a knowledge of men, and it was the secret of her success. She showed it in the dress in which she received her visitor. She wore a short walking skirt of heavy serge, a simple shirtwaist belted around, a sailor hat on her beautiful little head. She was unjeweled and unpainted, very pale and very sweet. If it had not been for the marks of fatigue under her eyes, she would not have looked more than eighteen. On her left hand a single diamond, clear as water, caught the refracted light.

“How-de-do? Glad you are back again.”

She gave him a big chair and sat down before him smiling. Leaning her elbows on her knees, she sank her face upon her hands and looked at him, not coquettishly in the least, but as a child might have looked. From her small feet to her golden head she was utterly charming.

Ruggles made himself think of Dan. Miss Lane spoke slowly, nodding toward him, in her languid voice: “It’s no use, Mr. Ruggles, no use.”

Holding her face between her hands, her eyes gray as winter’s seas and as profound, she looked at him intently; then, in a flash, she changed her position and instantly transformed her character. He saw that she was a woman, not an eighteen-year-old girl, but a woman, clever, poised, witty, understanding, and that she might have been twenty years older than the boy.

“I’m sorry you spoke so quick,” he said.

“I knew,” she interrupted, “just what you wanted to say from the start. I couldn’t help it, could I? I knew you would want to come and see me about it. It isn’t any use. I know just what you are going to say.”

“No, ma’am,” he returned, “I don’t believe you do—bright as you are.”

Ruggles gazed thoughtfully at the cold end of his unlighted cigar. It was a comfort to him to hold it and to look at it, although not for anything in the world would he have asked to light it.

“Dan’s father and me were chums. We went through pretty much together, and I know how he felt on most points. He was a man of few words, but I know he counted on me to stand By the boy.”

Ruggles was so chivalrous that his rôle at present cost him keen discomfort.

“A lady like you,” he said gently, “knows a great deal more about how things are done than either Dan or me. We ain’t tenderfeet in the West, not by a long shot, but we see so few of a certain kind of picture shows that when they do come round they’re likely to make us lose our minds! You know, yourself, a circus in a town fifty miles from a railroad drives the people crazy. Now, Dan’s a little like the boy with his eyes on the hole in the tent. He would commit murder to get inside and see that show.” He nodded and smiled to her as though he expected her to follow his crude simile. “Now, I have seen you a lot of times.” And she couldn’t help reminding him, “Not of your own accord, Mr. Ruggles.”

“Well, I don’t know,” he slowly admitted; “I always felt I had my money’s worth, and the night you ate with us at the Carlton I understood pretty well how the boy with his eyes at the tent hole would feel.” But he tapped his broad chest with the hand that held the cigar between the first and second fingers. “I know just what kind of a heart you’ve got, for I waited at the stage door and I know you don’t get all your applause inside the Gaiety Theater.”

“Goodness,” she murmured, “they make an awful fuss about nothing.”

“Now,” he continued, leaning forward a trifle toward her languid, half interested figure, “I just want you to think of him as a little boy. He’s only twenty-two. He knows nothing of the world. The money you give to the poor doesn’t come so hard perhaps as this will. It’s a big sacrifice, but I want you to let the boy go.”

She smiled slightly, found her handkerchief, which was tucked up the cuff of her blouse, pressed the little bit of linen to her lips as though to steady them, then she asked abruptly:

“What has he said to you?”

“Lord!” Ruggles groaned. “Said to me! My dear young lady, he is much too rude to speak. Dan sort of breathes and snorts around like a lunatic. He was dangling around that duchess when I was here before, but she didn’t scare me any.”

And Letty Lane, now smiling at him, relieved by his break from a more intense tone, asked:

“Now, you are scared?”

“Well,” Ruggles drawled, “I was pretty sure that woman didn’t care anything for the boy. Are you her kind?”

It was the best stroke he had made. She almost sprang up from her chair.

“Heavens,” she exclaimed, “I guess I’m not!” Her face flushed.

“I had rather see a son of mine dead than married to a woman like that,” he said.

“Why, Mr. Ruggles,” she exclaimed passionately, addressing him with interest for the first time, “what do you know about me? What? What? You have seen me dance and heard me sing.”

And he interrupted her.

“Ten times, and you are a bully dancer and a bully singer, but you do other things than dance and sing. There is not a man living that would want to have his mother dress that way.”

She controlled a smile. “Never mind that. People’s opinions are very different about that sort of thing. You have seen me at dinner with your boy, as you call him, and you can’t say that I did anything but ask him to help the poor. I haven’t led Dan on. I have tried to show him just what you are making me go through now.”

If she acted well and danced well, it was hard for her to talk. She was evidently under strong emotion and it needed her control not to burst into tears and lose her chance.

“Of course, I know the things you have heard. Of course, I know what is said about me”—and she stopped.

Ruggles didn’t press her any further; he didn’t ask her if the things were true. Looking at her as he did, watching her as he did, there was in him a feeling so new, so troubling that he found himself more anxious to protect her than to bring her to justice.

“There are worse, far worse women than I am, Mr. Ruggles. I will never do Dan any harm.”

Here her visitor leaned forward and put one of his big hands lightly over one of hers, patted it a moment, and said:

“I want you to do a great deal better than that.”

She had picked up a photograph off the table, a pretty picture of herself in Mandalay, and turned it nervously between her fingers as she said with irritation:

“I haven’t been in the theatrical world not to guess at this ‘Worried Father’ act, Mr. Ruggles. I told you I knew just what you were going to say.”

“Wrong!” he repeated. “The business is old enough perhaps, lots of good jobs are old, but this is a little different.”

He took the turning picture and laid it on the table, and quietly possessed himself of the small cold hands. Blair’s solitaire shone up to him. Ruggles looked into Letty Lane’s eyes. “He is only twenty-two; it ain’t fair, it ain’t fair. He could count the times he has been on a lark, I guess. He hasn’t even been to an eastern college. He is no fool, but he’s darned simple.”

She smiled faintly. The man’s face, near her own, was very simple indeed.

“You have seen so much,” he urged, “so many fellows. You have been such a queen, I dare say you could get any man you wanted.” He repeated. “Most any one.”

“I have never seen any one like Dan.”

“Just so: He ain’t your kind. That is what I am trying to tell you.”

She withdrew her hand from his violently.

“There you are wrong. He is my kind. He is what I like, and he is what I want to be like.”

A wave of red dyed her face, and, in a tone more passionate than she had ever used to her lover, she said to Ruggles:

“I love him—I love him!” Her words sent something like a sword through the older man’s heart. He said gently: “Don’t say it. He don’t know what love means yet.”

He wanted to tell her that the girl Dan married should be the kind of woman his mother was, but Ruggles couldn’t bring himself to say the words. Now, as he sat near her, he was growing so complex that his brain was turning round. He heard her murmur:

“I told you I knew your act, Mr. Ruggles. It isn’t any use.”

This brought him back to his position and once more he leaned toward her and, in a different tone from the one he had intended to use, murmured:

“You don’t know. You haven’t any idea. I do ask you to let Dan go, that’s a fact. I have got something else to propose in its place. It ain’t quite the same, but it is clear—marry me!”

She gave a little exclamation. A slight smile rippled over her face like the sunset across a pale pool at dawn.

“Laugh,” he said humbly; “don’t keep in. I know I am old-fashioned as the deuce, and me and Dan is quite a contrast, but I mean just what I say, my dear.”

She controlled her amusement, if it was that. It almost made her cry with mirth, and she couldn’t help it. Between laughing breaths she said to him:

“Oh, is it all for Dan’s sake, Mr. Ruggles? Is it?” And then, biting her lips and looking at him out of her wonderful eyes, she said: “I know it is—I know it is—I beg your pardon.”

“I asked a girl once when I was poor—too poor. Now this is the second time in my life. I mean just what I say. I’ll make you a kind husband. I am fifty-five, hale as a nut. I dare say you have had many better offers.”

“Oh, dear,” she breathed; “oh, dear, please—please stop!”

“But I don’t expect you to marry me for anything but my money.”

Ruggles put his cigar down on the edge of the table. He looked at his chair meditatively, he took out his silk handkerchief, polished up his glasses, readjusted them, put them on and then looked at her.

“Now,” he said, “I am going to trust you with something, and I know you will keep my secret for me. This shows you a little bit of what I think about you. Dan Blair hasn’t got a red cent. He has nothing but what I give him. There’s a false title to all that land on the Bentley claim. The whole thing came up when I was home and the original company, of which I own three-quarters of the stock, holds the clear titles to the Blairtown mines. It all belongs now to me, if I choose to present my documents. Dan knows nothing about this—not a word.”

The actress had never come up to such a dramatic point in any of her plays. With her hands folded in her lap she looked at him steadily, and he could not understand the expression that crossed her face. He heard her exclamation: “Oh, gracious!”

“I’ve brought the papers back with me,” said the Westerner, “and it is between you and me how we act. If Dan marries you I will be bound to do what old Blair would have done—cut him off—let him feel his feet on the ground, and the result of his own folly.”

He had taken his glasses off while he made this assertion. Now he put them on again.

“If you give him up I’ll divide with the boy and be rich enough still to hand over to my wife all she wants to spend.”

She turned her face away from him and leaned her head once more upon her hands. He heard her softly murmuring under her breath, with an absent look on her face, accompanied by a still more incomprehensible smile.

“That’s how it stands,” he concluded.

She seemed to have forgotten him entirely, and he caught his breath when she turned about abruptly and said:

“My goodness, how Dan will hate being poor! He will have to sell all his stickpins and his motor cars and all the things he has given me. It will be quite a little to start on, but he will hate it, he is so very smart.”

“Why, you don’t mean to say—” Ruggles gasped.

And with a charming smile as she rose to put their conversation at an end, she said:

“Why, you don’t mean to say that you thought I wouldn’t stand by him?” She seemed, as she put her hands upon her hips with something of a defiant look at the older man, as though she just then stood by her pauperized lover.

“I thought you cared some for the boy,” Ruggles said.

“Well, I am showing it.”

“You want to ruin him to show it, do you?”

As though he thought the subject dismissed he walked heavily toward the door.

“You know how it stands. I have nothing more to say.” He knew that he had signally failed, and as a sudden resentment rose in him he exclaimed, almost brutally:

“I am darned glad the old man is dead; I am glad his mother’s dead, and I am glad I have got no son.”

The next moment she was at his side, and he felt that she clung to his arm. Her sensitive, beautiful face, all drawn with emotion, was raised to his.

“Oh, you’ll kill me—you’ll kill me! Just look how very ill I am; you are making me crazy. I just worship him.”

“Give him up, then,” said Ruggles steadily.

She faltered: “I can’t—I can’t—it won’t be for long”—with a terrible pathos in her voice. “You don’t know how different I can be: you don’t know what a new life we were going to lead.”

Stammering, and with intense meaning, Ruggles, looking down at her, said: “My dear child—my dear child!”

In his few words something perhaps made her see in a flash her past and what the question really was. She dropped Ruggles’ arm. She stood for a moment with her arms folded across her breast, her head bent down, and the man at the door waited, feeling that Dan’s whole life was in the balance of the moment. When she spoke again her voice was hard and entirely devoid of the lovely appealing quality which brought her so much admiration from the public.

“If I give him up,” she said slowly, “what will you do?”

“Why,” he answered, “I’ll divide with Dan and let things stand just as they are.”

She thought again a moment and then as if she did not want him to witness—to detect the struggle she was going through, she turned away and walked over toward the window and dismissed him from there. “Please go, will you? I want very much to be alone and to think.”

CHAPTER XXV—LETTY LANE RUNS AWAY

The three hours had been busy ones at the actress’ apartment. Letty Lane’s sitting-room was full of trunks, dressing-bags and traveling paraphernalia. She came forward out of what seemed a world of confusion, dressed as though for a journey, even her veil and her gloves denoting her departure. She spoke hurriedly and almost without politeness.

“I have sent for you to come and see me here. Not a soul in London knows I am going away. There will be a dreadful row at the theater, but that’s none of your affairs. Now, I want you to tell me before I go just what you are going to do for Dan.”

“Who are you going with?” Ruggles asked shortly, and she flashed at him:

“Well, really, I don’t think that is any of your business. When you drive a woman as you have driven me, she will go far.”

He interrupted her vehemently, not daring to take her hand. “I couldn’t do more. I have asked you to marry me. I couldn’t do more. I stand by what I have said. Will you?” he stammered.

She knew men. She looked at him keenly. Her veil was lifted above her eyes and its shadow framed her small pale face on which there were marks of utter disenchantment, of great ennui. She said languidly: “What I want to know is, what you are going to do for Dan?”

“I told you I would share with him.”

“Then he will be nearly as rich?”

“He’ll have more than is good for him.”

That satisfied her. Then she pursued: “I want you to stand by him. He will need you.”

Ruggles lifted the hand he held and kissed it reverently. “I’ll do anything you say—anything you say.”

Down-stairs in the Savoy, as Dan had done countless times, Ruggles waited until he saw her motor car carry her and her small luggage and Higgins away.

In their sitting-room in the Carlton a half-hour later the door was thrown open and Dan Blair came in like a madman. Without preamble he seized Ruggles by the arm.

“Look here,” he cried, “what have you been doing? Tell me now, and tell me the truth, or, by God, I don’t know what I’ll do. You went to the Savoy. You went there twice. Anyhow, where is she?”

Dan, slender as he was beside Ruggles’ great frame, shook the elder man as though he had been a terrier. “Speak to me. Where has she gone?”

He stared in the Westerner’s face, his eyes bloodshot. “Why in thunder don’t you say something?”

And Ruggles prayed for some power to unloose his thickening tongue.

“You say she’s gone?” he questioned.

“I say,” said the boy, “that you’ve been meddling in my affairs with the woman I love. I don’t know what you have said to her, but it’s only your age that keeps me from striking you. Don’t you know,” he cried, “that you are spoiling my life? Don’t you know that?” A torrent of feeling coming to his lips, his eyes suffused, the tears rolled down his face. He walked away into his own room, remained there a few moments, and when he came out again he carried in his hand his valise, which he put down with a bang on the table. More calmly, but still in great anger, he said to his father’s friend:

“Now, can you tell me what you’ve done or not?”

“Dan,” said Ruggles with difficulty, “if you will sit down a moment we can—”

The boy laughed in his face. “Sit down!” he cried. “Why, I think you must have lost your reason. I have chartered a motor car out there and the damned thing has burst a tire and they are fixing it up for me. It will be ready in about two minutes and then I am going to follow wherever she has gone. She crossed to Paris, but I can get there before she can even with this damned accident. But, before I go, I want you to tell me what you said.”

“Why,” said Ruggles quietly, “I told her you were poor, and she turned you down.”

His words were faint.

“God!” said the boy under his breath. “That’s the way you think about truth. Lie to a woman to save my precious soul! But I expect,” he said; “you think she is so immoral and so bad that she will hurt me. Well,” he said, with great emphasis, “she has never done anything in her life that comes up to what you’ve done. Never! And nothing has ever hurt me so.”

His lips trembled. “I have lost my respect for you, for my father’s friend, and as far as she is concerned, I don’t care what she marries me for. She has got to marry me, and if she doesn’t”—he had no idea, in his passion, what he was saying or how—“why, I think I’ll kill you first and then blow my own brains out!” And with these mad words he grabbed up his valise and bolted from the room, and Ruggles could hear his running feet tearing down the corridor.

CHAPTER XXVI—WHITE AND CORAL

Spring in Paris, which comes in a fashion so divine that even the most calloused and indifferent are impressed by its beauty, awakened no answering response in the heart of the young man who, from his hotel window, looked out on the desecrated gardens of the Tuileries—on the distant spires of the churches whose names he did not know—on the square block of old palaces. He had missed the boat across the Channel taken by Letty Lane, and the delay had made him lose what little trace of her he had. In the early hours of the morning he had flung himself in at the St. James, taken the indifferent room they could give him in the crowded season, and excited as he was he slept and did not waken until noon. Blair thought it would be a matter of a few hours only to find the whereabouts of the celebrated actress, but it was not such an easy job. He had not guessed that she might be traveling incognito, and at none of the hotels could he hear news of her, nor did he pass her in the crowded, noisy, rustling, crying streets, though he searched motors for her with eager eyes, and haunted restaurants and cafés, and went everywhere that he thought she might be likely to be.

At the end of the third day, unsuccessful and in despair, having hardly slept and scarcely eaten, the unhappy young lover found himself taking a slight luncheon in the little restaurant known as the Perouse down on the Quais. His head on his hand, for the present moment the joy of life gone from him, he looked out through the windows at the Seine, at the bridge and the lines of flowering trees. He was the only occupant of the upper room where, of late, he had ordered his luncheon.

The tide of life rolled slowly in this quieter part of the city, and as Blair sat there under the window there passed a piper playing a shrill, sweet tune. It was so different from any of the loud metropolitan clamors, with which his ears were full, that he got up, walked to the window and leaned out. It was a pastoral that met his eyes. A man piping, followed by little pattering goats; the primitive, unlooked-for picture caught his tired attention, and, just then, opposite the Quais, two women passed—flower sellers, their baskets bright with crocuses and giroflés. The bright picture touched him and something of the springlike beauty that the day wore and that dwelt in the May light, soothed him as nothing had for many hours.

He paid his bill, took courage, picked up his hat and gloves and stick and walked out briskly, crossing the bridge to the Rue de Rivoli, determined that night should not fall until he found the woman he sought. Nor did it, though the afternoon wore on and Dan, pursuing his old trails, wandered from worldly meeting place to worldly meeting place. Finally, toward six o’clock, he saw the lengthening shadows steal into the woods of the Bois de Boulogne, and in one of the smaller alleys, where the green-trunked trees of the forests were full of purple shadows and yellow sun discs, flickering down, he picked up a small iron chair and sat himself down, with a long sigh, to rest.

While he sat there watching the end of the allée as it gave out into the broader road, a beautiful red motor rolled up to the conjunction of the two ways and Letty Lane, in a summer frock, got out alone. She had a flowing white veil around her head and a flowing white scarf around her shoulders. As the day on the Thames, she was all in white—like a dove. But this time her costume was made vivid and picturesque by the coral parasol she carried, a pair of coral-colored kid shoes, around her neck and falling on their long chain, she wore his coral beads. He saw that he observed her before she did him. All this Dan saw before he dashed into the road, came up to her with something like a cry on his lips, bareheaded, for his hat and his stick and his gloves were by his chair in the woods.

Letty Lane’s hands went to her heart and her face took on a deadly pallor. She did not seem glad to see him. Out of his passionate description of the hours that he had been through, of how he had looked for her, of what he thought and wanted and felt, the actress made what she could, listening to him as they both stood there under the shadows of the green trees. Scanning her face for some sign that she loved him, for it was all he cared for, Dan saw no such indication there. He finished with:

“You know what Ruggles told you was a lie. Of course, I’ve got money enough to give you everything you want. He’s a lunatic and ought to be shut up.”

“It may have been a lie, all right,” she said with forced indifference; “I’ve had time to think it over. You are too young. You don’t know what you want.” She stopped his protestations: “Well, then, I am too old and I don’t want to be tied down.”

When he pressed her to tell him whether or not she had ceased to care for him, she shook her head slowly, marking on the ground fine tracery with the end of her coral parasol. He had been obliged to take her back to the red motor, but before they were in earshot of her servants, he said:

“Now, you know just what you have done to me, you and Ruggles between you. For my father’s sake and the things I believed in I’ve kept pretty straight as things go.” He nodded at her with boyish egotism, throwing all the blame on her. “I want you to understand that from now, right now, I’m going to the dogs just as fast as I can get there, and it won’t be a very gratifying result to anybody that ever cared.”

She saw the determination on his fine young face, worn by his sleepless nights, already matured and changed, and she believed him.

“Paris,” he nodded toward the gate of the woods which opened upon Paris, “is the place to begin in—right here. A man,” he went on, and his lips trembled, “can only feel like this once in his life. You know all the talk there is about young love and first love. Well, that’s what I’ve got for you, and I’m going to turn it now—right now—into just what older people warn men from, and do their best to prevent. I have seen enough of Paris,” he went on, “these days I have been looking for you, to know where to go and what to do, and I am setting off for it now.”

She touched his arm.

“No,” she murmured. “No, boy, you are not going to do any such thing!”

This much from her was enough for him. He caught her hand and cried: “Then you marry me. What do we care for anybody else in the world?”

“Go back and get your hat and stick and gloves,” she commanded, keeping down the tears.

“No, no, you come with me, Letty; I’m not going to let you run to your motor and escape me again.”

“Go; I’ll wait here,” she promised. “I give you my word.”

As he snatched up the inanimate objects from the leaf-strewn ground where he had thrown them in despair, he thought how things can change in a quarter of an hour. For he had hope now, as he hurried back, as he walked with her to her car, as he saw the little coral shoes stir in the leaves when she passed under the trees. The little coral shoes trod on his heart, but now it was light under her feet!

Jubilant to have overcome the fate which had tried to keep her hidden from him in Paris, he could hardly believe his eyes that she was before them again, and, as the motor rolled into the Avenue des Acacias, he asked her the question uppermost in his mind:

“Are you alone in Paris, Letty?”

“Don’t you count?”

“No—no—honestly, you know what I mean.”

“You haven’t any right to ask me that.”

“I have—I have. You gave me a right. You’re engaged to me, aren’t you? Gosh, you haven’t forgotten, have you?”

“Don’t make me conspicuous in the Bois, Dan,” she said; “I only let you come with me because you were so terribly desperate, so ridiculous.”

“Are you alone?” he persisted. “I have got to know.”

“Higgins is with me.”

“Oh, God,” he cried wildly, “how can you joke with me? Don’t you understand you’re breaking my heart?”

But she did not dare to be kind to him, knowing it would unnerve her for the part she had promised to play.

He sat gripping his hands tightly together, his lips white. “When I leave you now,” he said brokenly, “I am going to find that devil of a Hungarian and do him up. Then I am going to tackle Ruggles.”

“Why, what’s poor Mr. Ruggles got to do with it?”

Dan cried scornfully: “For God’s sake, don’t keep this up! You know the rot he told you? I made him confess. He has had this mania all along about money being a handicap; he was bent on trying this game with some girl to see how it worked.” He continued more passionately. “I don’t care a rap what you marry me for, Letty, or what you have done or been. I think you’re perfect and I’ll make you the happiest woman in the world.”

She said: “Hush, hush! Listen, dear; listen, little boy. I am awfully sorry, but it won’t do. I never thought it would. You’ll get over it all right, though you don’t, you can’t believe me now. I can’t be poor, you know; I really couldn’t be poor.”

He interrupted roughly: “Who says you’ll be? What are you talking about? Why, I’ll cover you with jewels, sweetheart, if I have to rip the earth open to get them out.”

She understood that Dan believed Ruggles’ story to have been a cock-and-bull one.

“You talk as though you could buy me, Dan. Wait, listen.” She put him back from her. “Now, if you won’t be quiet, I’m going to stop my car.”

He repeated: “Tell me, are you alone in Paris? Tell me. For three days I have wandered and searched for you everywhere; I have hardly eaten a thing, I don’t believe I have slept a wink.” And he told her of his weary search.

She listened to him, part of the time her white-gloved hand giving itself up to the boy; part of the time both hands folded together and away from him, her arms crossed on her breast, her small shoes of coral kid tapping the floor of the car. Thus they rolled leisurely along the road by the Bois. Through the green-trunked trees the sunlight fell divinely. On the lake the swans swam, pluming their feathers; there were children there in their ribbons and furbelows. The whole world went by gay and careless, while for Dan the problem of his existence, his possibility for happiness or pain was comprised within the little room of the motor car.

“Are you alone in Paris, Letty?”

And she said: “Oh, what a bore you are! You’re the most obstinate creature. Well, I am alone, but that has nothing to do with you.”

A glorious light broke over his face; his relief was tremendous.

“Oh, thank God!” he breathed.

“Poniotowsky”—and she said his name with difficulty—“is coming to-night from Carlsbad.”

The boy threw back his bright head and laughed wildly.

“Curse him! The very name makes me want to commit a crime. He will go over my body to you. You hear me, Letty. I mean what I say.”

People had already remarked them as they passed. The actress was too well-known to pass unobserved, but she was indifferent to their curiosity or to the existence of any one but this excited boy.

Blair, who had not opened a paper since he came to Paris, did not know that Letty Lane’s flight from London had created a scandal in the theatrical world, that her manager was suing her, and that to be seen with her driving in the Bois was a conspicuous thing indeed. She thought of it, however.

“I am going to tell the man to drive you to the gate on the other side of the park where it’s quieter, we won’t be stared at, and then I want you to leave me and let me go to the Meurice alone. You must, Dan, you must let me go to the hotel alone.”

He laughed again in the same strained fashion and forced her hand to remain in his.

“Look here. You don’t suppose I am going to let you go like this, now that I have seen you again. You don’t suppose I am going to give you up to that infamous scoundrel? You have got to marry me.”

Bringing all her strength of character to bear, she exclaimed: “I expect you think you are the only person who has asked me to marry him, Dan. I am going to marry Prince Poniotowsky. He is perfectly crazy about me.”

Until that moment she had not made him think that she was indifferent to him, and the idea that such a thing was possible, was too much for his overstrained heart to bear. Dan cried her name in a voice whose appeal was like a hurt creature’s, and as the hurt creature in its suffering sometimes springs upon its torturer, he flung his arms around her as she sat in the motor, held her and kissed her, then set her free, and as the motor flew along, tore open the door to spring out or to throw himself out, but clinging to him she prevented his mad act. She stopped the car along the edge of the quiet, wooded allée. Blair saw that he had terrified her. She covered her beating heart with her hands and gasped at him that he was “crazy, crazy,” and perhaps a little late his dignity and self-possession returned.

“I am mad,” he acknowledged more calmly, “and I am sorry that I frightened you. But you drive me mad.”

Without further word he got out and left her agitated, leaning toward him, and Blair, less pale and thoroughly the man, lifted his hat to her and, with unusual grace, bowed good night and good-by. Then, rushing as he had come, he walked off down through the allée, his gray figure in his gray clothes disappearing through the vista of meeting trees.

For a moment she stared after him, her eyes fastened on the tall slender beautiful young man. Blair’s fire and ardor, his fresh youthfulness, his protection and his chivalry, his ardent devotion, touched her profoundly. Tears fell, and one splashed on her white glove. Was he really going to ruin his life? The old ballad, The Earl of Moray, ran through her head:

    “And  long  may  his  lady  look  from  the  castle  wall.”

Dan had neither title nor, according to Ruggles, had he any money, and she could marry the prince; but Dan, as he walked so fast away, misery snapping at his heels as he went, stamping through the woods, seemed glorious to Letty Lane and the only one she wanted in the world. What if anything should happen to him really? What if he should really start out to do the town according to the fashion of his Anglo-Saxon brothers, but more desperately still? She took a card from the case in the corner of the car, scribbled a few words, told the man to drive around the curve and meet the outlet of the path by which Dan had gone. When she saw him within reaching distance she sent the chauffeur across the woods to give Mr. Blair her scribbled word and consoled herself with the belief that Dan wouldn’t “go to the dogs or throw himself in the river until he had seen her again.”

CHAPTER XXVII—AT MAXIM’S

Her dinner, without much appetite, she ate alone in her salon; saw a doctor and made him prescribe something for the cough that racked her chest; looked out to the warm, bright gardens of the Tuileries fading into the pallid loveliness of sunset, indifferent to everything in the world—except Dan Blair. She believed she would soon be indifferent to him, too; then everything would be done with. Now she wondered had he really gone—had he done what he threatened? Why didn’t he come? At twelve o’clock that night, as she lay among the cushions of her sofa, dozing, the door of her parlor was pushed in. She sprang up with a cry of delight; but when Poniotowsky came up to her she exclaimed:

“Oh, you!” And the languor and boredom with which she said his name made the prince laugh shortly.

“Yes, I. Who did you think it was?” Cynically and rather cruelly he looked down at Letty Lane and admired the picture she made: small, exquisite, her blond head against the dark velvet of the lounge, her gray eyes intensified by the fatigue under them.

“Just got in from Carlsbad; came directly here. How-de-do? You look, you know—” he scrutinized her through his single eye-glass—“most frightfully seedy.”

“Oh, I’m all right.” She left the sofa, for she wanted to prevent his nearer approach. “Have you had any supper? I’ll call Higgins.”

“No, no, sit down, please, will you? I want to know why you sent to Carlsbad for me? Have you come to your senses?”

He was as mad about the beautiful creature as a man of his temperament could be. Exhausted by excess and bored with life, she charmed and amused him, and in order to have her with him always, to be master of her caprices, he was willing to make any sacrifice.

“Have you sent off that imbecile boy?” And at her look he stopped and shrugged. “You need a rest, my child,” he murmured practically, “you’re neurasthenic and very ill. I’ve wired to have the yacht at Cherbourg—It’ll reach there by noon to-morrow.”

She was standing listlessly by the table. A mass of letters sent by special messenger from London after her, telegrams and cards lay there in a pile. Looking down at the lot, she murmured: “All right, I don’t care.”

He concealed his triumph, but before the look had faded from his face she saw it and exclaimed sharply:

“Don’t be crazy about it, you know. You’ll have to pay high for me; you know what I mean.”

He answered gallantly: “My dear child, I’ve told you that you would be the most charming princess in Hungary.”

Once more she accepted indifferently: “All right, all right, I don’t care tuppence—not tuppence”—and she snapped her fingers; “but I like to see you pay, Frederigo. Take me to Maxim’s.”

He demurred, saying she was far too ill, but she turned from him to call Higgins, determined to go if she had to go alone, and said to him violently: “Don’t think I’ll make your life easy for you, Frederigo. I’ll make it wretched; as wretched—” and she held out her fragile arms, and the sleeves fell back, leaving them bare—“as wretched as I am myself.”

But she was lovely, and he said harshly: “Get yourself dressed. I’ll go change and meet you at the lift.”

She made him take a table in the corner, where she sat in the shadow on the sofa, overlooking the brilliant room. Maxim’s was no new scene to either of them, no novelty. Poniotowsky scarcely glanced at the crowd, preferring to feast his eyes on his companion, whose indifference to him made his abstraction easy. She was his property. He would give her his title; she had demanded it from the first. The Hungarian was a little overdressed, with his jeweled buttons, his large boutonnière, his faultless clothes, his single eye-glass through which he stared at Letty Lane, whose delicate beauty was in fine play: her cheeks faintly pink, her starry eyes humid with a dew whose luster is of the most precious quality. Her unshed tears had nothing to do with Poniotowsky—they were for the boy. Her heart sickened, thinking where he might be; and more than that, it cried out for him. She wanted him.

Oh, she would have been far better for Dan than anything he could find in this mad city, than anything to which in his despair he would go for consolation. She had kept her word, however, to that old man, Mr. Ruggles; she had got out of the business with a fatal result, as far as the boy was concerned. She thought Dan would drift here probably as most Americans on their wild nights do for a part of the time, and she had come to see.

She wore a dress of coral pink, tightly fitting, high to her little chin, and seemed herself like a coral strand from neck to toe, clad in the color she affected, and which had become celebrated as the Letty Lane pink. Her feathered hat hid her face, and she was completely shielded as she bent down drawing pictures with her bare finger on the cloth. After a little while she said to Poniotowsky without glancing at him:

“If you stare any longer like that, Frederigo, you’ll break your eye-glass. You know how I hate it.”

Used as he was to her sharpness, he nevertheless flushed and sat back and looked across the room, where, to their right, protected from them as they were from him by the great door, a young man sat alone. Whether or not he had come to Maxim’s intending to join a congenial party, should he find one, or to choose for a companion some one of the women who, at the entrance of the tall blond boy, stirred and invited him with their raised lorgnons and their smiles, will not be known. Dan Blair was alone, pale as the pictures Letty Lane had drawn on the cloth, and he, too, feasted his eyes on the Gaiety girl.

“By Jove!” said the Hungarian under his breath, and she eagerly asked: “What? Whom? Whom do you see?”

Turning his back sharply he evaded her question and she did not pursue the idea, and as a physical weakness overwhelmed her, when Poniotowsky after a second said, “Come, chérie, for heaven’s sake, let’s go”—she mechanically rose and passed out.

Several young men supping together came over eagerly to speak to her and claim acquaintance with the Gaiety girl, and walked along out to the motor. There Letty Lane discovered she had dropped her handkerchief, and sent the prince back for it.

As though he had been waiting for the reappearance of Poniotowsky, Dan Blair stood close to the little table which Letty Lane had left, her handkerchief in his hand. As Poniotowsky came up Dan thrust the small trifle of sheer linen into his waistcoat pocket.

“I will trouble you for Miss Lane’s handkerchief,” said Poniotowsky, his eyes cold.

“You may,” said Dan as quietly, his blue eyes like sparks from a star, “trouble me for hell!” And lifting from the table Poniotowsky’s own half-emptied glass of champagne, the boy flung the contents full in the Hungarian’s face.

The wine dashed against Poniotowsky’s lips and in his eyes. Blair laughed out loud, his hands in his pockets. The insult was low and noiseless; the little glass shattered as it fell so softly that with the music its gentle crash was unheard.

Poniotowsky wiped his face tranquilly and bowed.

“You shall hear from me after I have taken Miss Lane home.”

“Tell her,” said the boy, “where you left the handkerchief, that’s all.”