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 matinee days."

"Put on your scarf." Poniotowsky, taking it from her hands, laid it across her white shoulders, and she pa.s.sed 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess repeated.

And Dan told her a meaningless lie. "I didn't meet any one there." And with satisfaction the d.u.c.h.ess 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 s.e.x 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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. t.i.tles 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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-gla.s.s 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 f.a.g; 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 gla.s.s 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 pa.s.s 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

Blair did not go back at once to Osdene Park. He stopped over in London for a few days to see Joshua Ruggles, and so remarked for the first time the difference between the speech of the old and the new world. Mr.

Ruggles spoke broadly, with complete disregard of the frills and adornments of the King's English. He spoke United States of the pure, broad, western brand, and it rang out, it vibrated and swelled and rolled, and as Ruggles didn't care who heard him, nothing of what he had to say was lost.

Old Mr. Blair had left behind him a comrade, and as far as advice could go the old man knew that his Dan would not be bankrupt.

"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 princ.i.p.al 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 hobn.o.bbed 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."