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

He had not got up-stairs to his rooms at the Carlton before a note was handed him from the actress, bidding him to return at once to the Savoy, and Ruggles, his heart hammering like a trip-hammer, rushed up to his rooms, made an evening toilet, for it was then half-past seven, threw his cravats and collars all around the place, cursed like a miner as he got into his clothes, and red almost to apoplexy, nervous and full of emotion, he returned to the rooms he had left not three hours before.

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 G.o.d, 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 d.a.m.ned 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 d.a.m.ned 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.

"G.o.d!" 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.s her in the crowded, noisy, rustling, crying streets, though he searched motors for her with eager eyes, and haunted restaurants and cafes, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed-flower sellers, their baskets bright with crocuses and girofles. 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 _allee_ 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 pa.s.sionate 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: