"Well, I am discovered--and lost." Julie, lazily making the
announcement after a long silence, shut her magazine with a sigh of
sleepy content; and braced herself more comfortably against the old
rowboat that was half buried in sand at her back. She turned as she
spoke to smile at the woman near her, a frail, keen-faced little woman
luxuriously settled in an invalid's wheeled chair.
"Ann--you know you're not interested in that book. Did you hear what I
said? I'm discovered."
"Well, it was sure to happen, sooner or later, I suppose." Mrs.
Arbuthnot, suddenly summoned from the pages of a novel brought her gaze
promptly to the younger woman's face, with the pitifully alert interest
of the invalid. "You were bound to be recognized by some one, Ju!"
"Don't worry, a cannon wouldn't wake him!" said Julia, in reference to
Mrs. Arbuthnot's lowered voice, and the solicitous look the wife had
given a great opened beach umbrella three feet away, under which Dr.
Arbuthnot slumbered on the warm sands. "He's forty fathoms deep. No,"
continued the actress, returning aggrievedly to her own affairs, "I
suppose there's no such thing as escaping recognition--even as late in
the season as this, and at such an out-of-the-way place. Of course, I
knew," she continued crossly, "that various people here had placed me,
but I did rather hope to escape actual introductions!"
"Who is it--some one you know?" Mrs. Arbuthnot adjusted the pillow at
her back, and settled herself enjoyably for a talk.
"Indirectly; it's that little butterfly of a summer girl--the one Jim
calls 'The Dancing Girl'--of all people in the world!" said Julie,
locking her arms comfortably behind her head. "You know how she's been
haunting me, Ann? She's been simply DETERMINED upon an introduction
ever since she placed me as her adored Miss Ives of matinee fame. I
imagine she's rather a nice child--every evidence of money--the
ambitious type that longs to do something big--and is given to
desperate hero worship. She's been under my feet for a week, with a
Faithful Tray expression that drives me crazy. I've taken great pains
not to see her."
"And now--?" prompted the other, as the actress fell silent, and sat
staring dreamily at the brilliant sweep of beach and sea before them.
"Oh--now," Miss Ives took up her narrative briskly. "Well, a new young
man arrived on the afternoon boat and, of course, the Dancing Girl
instantly captivated him. She has one simple yet direct method with
them all," she interrupted herself to digress a little. "She gets one
of her earlier victims to introduce him; they all go down for a swim,
she fascinates him with her daring and her bobbing red cap, she returns
to white linen and leads him down to play tennis--they have tea at the
'Casino,' and she promises him the second two-step and the first extra
that evening. He is then hers to command," concluded Julie, bringing
her amused eyes back to Mrs. Arbuthnot's face, "for the remainder of
his stay!"
"That's exactly what she DOES do," said Mrs. Arbuthnot, laughing, "but
I don't see yet--"
"Oh, I forgot to say," Miss Ives amended hastily, "that to-day's young
man happens to be an acquaintance of mine; at least his uncle
introduced him to me at a tea last winter. She led him by to the tennis
courts an hour ago, and, to my disgust, I recognized him. That's all
Miss Dancing Girl wants. Now--you'll see! They'll come up to our table
in the dining-room to-night, and to-morrow she'll bring up a group of
dear friends and he'll bring up another--to be introduced; and--there
we'll be!"
"Oh, not so bad as that, Julie!"
"Oh, yes, indeed, Ann!" pursued Miss Ives with morose enjoyment. "You
don't know how helpless one is. I'll be annoyed to death for the rest
of the month, just so that the Dancing Girl can go back to the city
this winter and say, 'Oh, girls, Julia Ives was staying where mamma and
I were this summer, and she's just a DEAR! She doesn't make up one bit
off the stage, and she dresses just as PLAIN! I saw her every day and
got some dandy snapshots. She's just a darling when you know her.'"
"Well! What an unspoiled modest little soul you are, Julie!"
interrupted the doctor's admiring voice. He wheeled away the umbrella
and, lying luxuriously on his elbows in the sun, beamed at them both
through his glasses.
"Jim," said the actress, severely, "it's positively indecent--the habit
you're getting of evesdropping on Ann and me!"
"It gives me sidelights on your characters," said the doctor, quite
brazenly.
"Ann--don't you call that disgraceful?"
"I certainly do, Ju," his wife agreed warmly. "But Jim has no sense of
honor." Ann Arbuthnot, in the fifteen years of her married life, had
never been able to keep a thrill of adoration out of her voice when she
spoke, however jestingly, of her husband. It trembled there now.
"Well, what's wrong, Julie? Some old admirer turn up?" asked the
doctor, sleepily content to follow any conversational lead, in the idle
pleasantness of the hour.
"No--no!" she corrected him, "just some silly social complications
ahead--which I hate!"
"Be rude," suggested the doctor, pleasantly.
"Now, you know, I'd love that!" said Mrs. Arbuthnot, youthfully. "I'd
simply love to be followed and envied and adored!"
"No, you wouldn't, Ann!" Miss Ives assured her promptly. "You'd like
it, as I did, for a little while. And then the utter USELESSNESS of it
would strike you. Especially from such little complacent, fluffy
whirlings as that Dancing Girl!"
"Yes, and that's the kind of a girl I like," persisted the other,
smiling.
"That's the kind of a girl you WERE, Ann, I've no doubt," said the
actress, vivaciously, "only sweeter. I know she wore white ruffles and
a velvet band on her hair, didn't she, Jim? And roses in her belt?"
"She did," said the doctor, reminiscently. "I believe she flirted in
her kindergarten days. She was always engaged to ride or dance or row
on the river with the other men--and always splitting her dances, and
forgetting her promises, and wearing the rings and pins of her adorers."
"And the fun was, Ju," said Mrs. Arbuthnot, girlishly, with bright
color in her cheeks, "that when Jim came there to give two lectures,
you know, all the older girls were crazy about him--and he was ten
years older than I, you know, and I never DREAMED--"
"Oh, you go to, Ann! You never DREAMED!" said Miss Ives, lazily.
"Honestly, I didn't!" Mrs. Arbuthnot protested. "I remember my brother
Billy saying, 'Babs, you don't think Dr. Arbuthnot is coming here to
see ME, do you?' and then it all came over me! Why, I was only
eighteen."
"And engaged to Billy's chum," said the doctor.
"Well," said the wife, naively, "he knew all along it wasn't serious."
"You must have been a rose," said Miss Ives, "and I would have hated
you! Now, when I went to dances," she pursued half seriously, "I sat in
one place and smiled fixedly, and watched the other girls dance. Or I
talked with great animation to the chaperons. Ann, I've felt sometimes
that I would gladly die, to have the boys crowd around me just once,
and grab my card and scribble their names all over it. I didn't dress
very well, or dance very well--and I never could talk to boys." She
began to trace a little watercourse in the sand with an exquisite
finger tip. "I was the most unhappy girl on earth, I think! I felt
every birthday was a separate insult--twenty, and twenty-two, and
twenty-four! We were poor, and life was--oh, not dramatic or big!--but
just petty and sordid. I used to rage because the dining-room was the
only place for the sewing-machine, and rage because my bedroom was
really a back parlor. Well!--I joined a theatrical company--came away.
And many a night, tired out and discouraged, I've cried myself to sleep
because I'd never have any girlhood again!"
She stopped with a half-apologetic laugh. The doctor was watching her
with absorbed, bright eyes. Mrs. Arbuthnot, unable to imagine youth
without joy and beauty, protested:
"Julie--I don't believe you--you're exaggerating! Do you mean you
didn't go on the stage until you were twenty-four!"
"I was twenty-six. I was leading lady my second season, and starred my
third," said the actress, without enthusiasm. "I was starred in 'The
Jack of Clubs.' It ran a season in New York and gave me my start. Lud,
how tired we all got of it!"
"And then I hope you went back home, Ju, and were lionized," said the
other woman, vigorously.
"Oh, not then! No, I'd been meaning to go--and meaning to go--all those
three years. The little sisters used to write me--such forlorn little
letters!--and mother, too--but I couldn't manage it. And then--the very
night 'Jack' played the three hundredth time, as it happened--I had
this long wire from Sally and Beth. Mother was very ill, wanted
me--they'd meet a certain train, they were counting the hours--"
Miss Ives demolished her watercourse with a single sweep of her palm.
There was a short silence.
"Well!" she said, breaking it. "Mother got well, as it happened, and I
went home two months later. I had the guest room, I remember. Sally was
everything to mother then, and I tried to feel glad. Beth was engaged.
Every one was very flattering and very kind in the intervals left by
engagements and weddings and new babies and family gatherings. Then I
came back to 'Jack,' and we went on the road. And then I broke down and
a strange doctor in a strange hospital put me together again," she went
on with a flashing smile and a sudden change of tone, "and his wholly
adorable wife sent me double white violets! And they--the Arbuthnots,
not the violets--were the nicest thing that ever happened to me!"
"So that was the way of it?" said the doctor.
"That was the way of it."
"And as the Duchess would say, the moral of THAT is--?"
"The moral is for me. Or else it's for little dancing girls, I don't
know which." Miss Ives wiped her eyes openly and, restoring her
handkerchief to its place, announced that she perceived she had been
talking too much.
Presently the Dancing Girl came down from the tennis-court, with her
devoted new captive in tow. The captive, a fat, amiable-looking youth,
was warm and wilted, but the girl was fresh and buoyant as ever. They
heard her allude to the "second two-step" and something was said of the
"supper dance," but her laughing voice stopped as she and her escort
came nearer the actress, and she gave Julie her usual look of mute
adoration. The boy, flushing youthfully, lifted his hat, and Julie
bowed briefly.
They were lingering over their coffee two hours later, when the newly
arrived young man made the expected move. He threaded the tables
between his own and the doctor's carefully, the eager Dancing Girl in
his wake.
"I don't know whether you remember me, Miss Ives--?" he began, when he
could extend a hand.
Julie turned her splendid, unsmiling eyes toward him.
"Mr. Polk. How do you do? Yes, indeed, I remember you," she said,
unenthusiastically. "How is Mr. Gilbert?"
"Uncle John? Oh, he's fine!" said young Polk, rapturously. "I wonder
why he didn't tell me you were spending the summer here!"
"I don't tell any one," said Julie, simply. "My winters are so crowded
that I try to get away from people in the summer."
"Oh!" said the boy, a little blankly. There was an instant's pause
before he added rather uncomfortably:
"Miss Ives--Miss Carter has been so anxious to meet you--"
"How do you do, Miss Carter?" said Julie, promptly, politely. She gave
her young adorer a ready hand. The usually poised Dancing Girl could
not recall at the moment one of the things she had planned to say when
this great moment came. But she thought of them all as she lay in bed
that night, and the conviction that she had bungled the long-wished-for
interview made her burn from her heels to the lobes of her ears. What
HAD she said? Something about having longed for this opportunity, which
the actress hadn't answered, and something about her desperate
admiration for Miss Ives, at which Miss Ives had merely smiled. Other
things were said, or half said--the girl reviewed them mercilessly in
the dark--and then the interview had terminated, rather flatly. Marian
Carter writhed at the recollection.
But the morning brought courage. She passed Julie, who was fresh from a
plunge in the ocean, and briskly attacking a late breakfast, on her way
from the dining-room.
"Good morning, Miss Ives! Isn't it a lovely morning?"
"Oh, good morning, Miss Carter. I beg pardon--?"
"I said, 'Isn't it a lovely morning?'"
"Oh--? Yes, quite delightful."
"Miss Ives--but I'm interrupting you?"
Julie gave her book a glance and raised her eyes expectantly to Miss
Carter's face, but did not speak.
"Miss Ives," said Miss Carter, a little confusedly, "mamma was
wondering if you've taken the trip to Fletcher's Forest? We've our
motor-car here, you know, and they serve a very good lunch at the Inn."
"Oh, thank you, no!" said Julie, positively. "VERY good of you--but I'm
with the Arbuthnots, you know. Thank you, no."
"I hoped you would," said Miss Carter, disappointed. "I know you use a
motor in town," she answered daringly. "You see I know all about you!"
Miss Ives paid to this confession only the small tribute of raised
eyebrows and an absent smile. She was quite at her ease, but in the
little silence that followed Miss Carter had time to feel baffled--in
the way. "Here is Mrs. Arbuthnot," she said in relief, as Ann came
slowly in on the doctor's arm. Before they reached the table the girl
had slipped away.
That afternoon she asked Miss Ives, pausing beside the basking group on
the sands to do so, if she would have tea informally with mamma and a
few friends. Oh--thank you, Miss Ives couldn't, to-day. Thank you. The
next day Miss Carter wondered if Miss Ives would like to spin out to
the Point to see the sunset? No, thank you so much. Miss Ives was just
going in. Another day brought a request for Miss Ives's company at
dinner, with just mamma and Mr. Polk and the Dancing Girl herself.
Declined. A fourth day found Miss Carter, camera in hand, smilingly
confronting the actress as she came out on the porch.
"Will you be very cross if I ask you to stand still just a moment, Miss
Ives?" asked the Dancing Girl.
"Oh, I'm afraid I will," said Julie, annoyed. "I DON'T like to be
photographed!" But she was rather disarmed at the speed with which Miss
Carter shut up her little camera.
"I know I bother you," said the girl, with a wistful sincerity that was
most becoming and with a heightened color, "but--but I just can't seem
to help it!" She walked down the steps beside Julie, laughing almost
with vexation at her own weakness. "I've always admired so--the people
who DO things! I've always wanted to do something myself," said Miss
Carter, awkwardly. "You don't know how unhappy it makes me. You don't
know how I'd love to do something for you!"
"You can, you can let me off being photographed, like a sweet child!"
said Julie, lightly. But twenty minutes later when, very trim and
dainty in her blue bathing suit and scarlet cap, she came out of the
bath-house to join Ann and the doctor on the beach, she reproached
herself. She might have met the stammered little confidence with
something warmer than a jesting word, she thought with a little shame.
"You're not going in again!" protested Ann. "Oh, CHIL-dren!"
"_I_ am," said Miss Ives, buoyantly. "I don't know about Jim. At Jim's
age every step counts, I suppose. These fashionable doctors habitually
overeat and oversleep, I understand, and it makes them lazy."
"I AM going in, Ann," said the doctor, with dignity, rising from the
sand and pointedly addressing his wife. A few moments later he and
Julie joyously breasted the sleepy roll of the low breakers, and pushed
their way steadily through the smoother water beyond.
"Oh, that was glorious, Jim!" gasped the actress, as they gained the
raft that was always their goal and pulling herself up to sit
siren-wise upon it. She was breathless, radiant, bubbling with the joy
of sun and air and green water. She took off her cap and let the
sunlight beat on her loosened braids.
"How you love the water, Julie!"
"Yes--best of all. I'm never so satisfied as when I'm in it!"
"You never look so happy as when you are," he said.
"Oh, these are happy days!" said Julie. "I wish they could last
forever. Just resting and playing--wouldn't you like a year of it, Jim?"
The doctor eyed her quietly.
"I don't know that I would," he said seriously, impersonally.
There was a little silence. Then the girl began to pin up her braids
with fingers that trembled a little.
"Ann's waving!" she said presently, and the doctor caught up her
scarlet cap to signal back to the far blur on the beach that was Ann.
He watched the tiny distant groups a moment.
"Here comes your admirer!" said he.
"Where?" Julie was ready at once to slip into the water.
"Oh--finish your hair--take your time! She's just in the breakers.
We'll be off long before she gets here."
"That reminds me, Jim," Miss Ives was quite herself again, "that when I
was in the bath-house a few moments ago your Dancing Girl and that
pretty little girl who is visiting her came into the next room. You
know how flimsy the walls are? I could hear every word they said."
"If you'd been a character in a story, Ju, you'd have felt it your duty
to cough!"
"Well, I didn't," grinned Miss Ives; "not that I wanted to hear what
they were saying. I didn't even know who they were until I heard little
Miss Carter say solemnly, 'Ethel, I used to want mamma to get that
Forty-eighth Street house, and I used to want to do Europe, but I think
if I had ONE wish now, it would be to do something that would MAKE
everybody know me--and everybody talk about me. I'd LOVE to be pointed
out wherever I went. I'd love to have people stare at me. I'd like to
be just as popular and just as famous as Julia Ives!'"
"She HAS got it badly, Ju!" the doctor observed.
"She has. And it will be fuel on the flames to have me start to swim
back to shore while she is swimming as hard as she can to the raft!"
said the lady, tucking the last escaping lock under her cap and
springing up for the plunge that started the home trip.
It was only a little after midnight that night when Julie, lying
wakeful in the sultry summer darkness, was startled by a person in her
room.
"It's Emma, Miss Ives," said Mrs. Arbuthnot's maid, stumbling about,
"Mrs. Arbuthnot wants you."
"She's ill!" Julie felt rather than said the words, instantly alert and
alarmed, and reaching for her wrapper and slippers.
"No, ma'am. But the doctor feels like he ought to go down to the fire,
and she's nervous--"
"The fire?"
"Yes'm," said Emma, simply, "the windmill is afire!"
"And I sleeping through it all!" Miss Ives was still bewildered,
fastening the sash of her cobwebby black Mandarin robe as she followed
Emma through the passage that joined her suite to the Arbuthnots'.
"Ann, dear--Emma tells me the laundry's on fire?" said she, entering
the big room. "I had no idea of it!"
"Nor had we," the doctor's wife rejoined eagerly. "The first we knew
was from Emma. Jim says there's no danger. Do you think there is?"
"Certainly not, Ann!" Julie laughed. "I'll tell you what we can do,"
she added briskly. "We'll wheel you down the hall here to the window;
you can get a splendid view of the whole thing."
The doctor approving, the ladies took up their station at a wide hall
window that commanded the whole scene.
Outside the velvet blackness and silence of the night were shattered.
The great mill, ugly tongues of flame bursting from the door and
windows at its base, was the centre of a talking, shouting,
shrill-voiced crowd that was momentarily, in the mysterious fashion of
crowds, gathering size.
"Wonderful sight, isn't it, Ann?"
"Wonderful. Does this cut off our water supply, Emma?"
"No, Mrs. Arbuthnot. They're using the little mill for the engines now."
"What did they use the big mill for, Emma?"
"The laundry, Miss Ives. And there's a sort of flat on the second floor
where the laundry woman and her husband--he's the man that drives the
'bus--live."
"Good heavens!" said Ann. "I hope they got out!"
"Oh, sure," said the maid, comfortably. "It was all of an hour ago the
fire started. They had lots of time."
The three watched for a while in silence. Ann's eyes began to droop
from the bright monotony of the flames.
"I believe I'll wait until the tank falls, Ju? and then go back to my
comfortable bed--Julie, what is it--!"
Her voice rose, keen with terror. The actress, her hand on her heart,
shook her head without turning her eyes from the mill.
For suddenly above the other clamor there had risen one horrible
scream, and now, following it, there was almost a silence.
"Why--what on earth--" panted Miss Ives, looking to Mrs. Arbuthnot for
explanation after an endless interval in which neither stirred. But
again they were interrupted, this time by such an outbreak of shouting
and cries from the watching crowd about the mill as made the night
fairly ring.
A moment later the entire top of the mill collapsed, sending a gush of
sparks far up into the night. Then at last the faithfully played hoses
began to gain control.
"Do run down and find out what the shouting was, Emma," said Julie.
Emma gladly obeyed.
"She'd come back, if anything had happened," said Julie, some ten
minutes later.
"Who--Emma?" Mrs. Arbuthnot was not alarmed. "Oh, surely!" she yawned,
and drew her wraps about her.
"It's all over now. But I suppose it will burn for hours. I think I'll
turn in again," she said.
"I've had enough, too!" Julie said, not quite easy herself, but glad to
find the other so. "Let's decamp."
She wheeled the invalid carefully back to her room, where both women
were still talking when a bell-boy knocked, bringing a message from the
doctor. A woman had been hurt; he would be busy with her for an hour.
"Who was it?" Julie asked him, but the boy, obviously frantic to return
to the fascinations of the fire, didn't know.
It was more than an hour later that the doctor came in. Julie had been
reading to Ann. She shut the book.
"Jim! What on earth has kept you so long?"
"Frighten you, dear?" The doctor was very pale; he looked, between the
dirt and disorder of his clothes, and the anxiety of his face, like an
old man.
"Some one was hurt?" flashed Julie, solicitous at once.
"Has no one told you about it?" he wondered. "Lord! I should think it
would be all over the place by this time!"
He dropped into an easy chair, and sank his head wearily into his hands.
"Lord--Lord--Lord!" he muttered. Then he looked up at his wife with the
smile that never failed her.
"Jim--no one was killed?"
"Oh, no, dear! No, I'll tell you." He came over and sat beside her on
the bed, patting her hand. The two women watched him with tense,
absorbed faces.
"When I got there," said the doctor, slowly, "there was quite a
crowd--the lower story of the mill was all aflame--and the firemen were
keeping the people back. They'd a ladder up at the second story and
firemen were pitching things out of the windows as fast as they
could--chairs, rugs, pillows, and so on. Finally the last man came out,
smoke coming after him--it was quick work! Now, remember, dear, no one
was killed--" he stopped to pat his wife's hand reassuringly. "Well,
just then, at the third-story windows--it seems the laundress has
children--"
"Children!" gasped Miss Ives. "Oh, NO!"
"Yes, four of 'em--the oldest a little fellow of ten, had the baby in
his arms--." The doctor stopped.
"Go ON, Jim!"
"Well, they put the ladder back again, but the sill was aflame then. No
use! Just then the mother and father--poor souls--arrived. They'd been
at a dance in the village. The woman screamed--"
"We heard."
"Ah? The man had to be held, poor fellow! It was--it was--" Again the
doctor stopped, unable to go on. But after a few seconds he began more
briskly: "Well! The mill was connected with this house, you know, by a
little bridge, from the tank floor of the mill to the roof. No one had
thought of it, because every one supposed that there was no one in the
mill. Before the crowd had fairly seen that there WERE children caged
up there, they left the window, and not a minute later we saw them come
up the trap-door by the tank. Lord, how every one yelled."
"They'd thought of it, the darlings!" half sobbed Mrs. Arbuthnot.
"No, they'd never have thought of it--too terrified, poor little
things. No. We all saw that there was some one--a woman--with them
hurrying them along. I was helping hold the mother or I might have
thought it was the mother. They scampered across that bridge like
little squirrels, the woman with the baby last. By that time the mill
was roaring like a furnace behind them, and the bridge itself burst
into flames at the mill end. She--the woman--must have felt it
tottering, for she flung herself the last few feet--but she couldn't
make it. She threw the baby, by some lucky accident, for she couldn't
have known what she was doing, safe to the others, and caught at the
rail, but the whole thing gave way and came down.... I got there about
the first--she'd only fallen some dozen feet, you know, on the flat
roof of the kitchen, but she was all smashed up, poor little girl. We
carried her into the housekeeper's room--and then I saw that it was
little Miss Carter--your Dancing Girl, Ju!"
"Jim! Dead?"
"Oh, no! I don't think she'll die. She's badly burned, of course--face
and hands especially--but it's the spine I'm afraid for. We can tell
better to-morrow. We made her as comfortable as we could. I gave her
something that'll make her sleep. Her mother's with her. But I'm afraid
her dancing days are over."
"Think of it--little Miss Carter!" Julie's voice sounded dazed.
"But, Jim," Ann said, "what was she doing in the mill?"
"Why, that's the point," he said. "She wasn't there when the fire
started. She was simply one of the crowd. But when she heard that the
children were there, she ran to the back of the mill, where there was a
straight up-and-down ladder built against the wall outside, so that the
tank could be reached that way. She went up it like a flash--says she
never thought of asking any one else to go. She broke a window and
climbed in--she says the floor was hot to her feet then--and she and
the kids ran up the inside flight to the trap-door. They obeyed her
like little soldiers! But the bridge side of the mill was the side the
fire was on, and the wood was rotten, you know--almost explosive. Half
a minute later and they couldn't have made it at all."
"How do you ACCOUNT for such courage in a girl like that?" marvelled
Julie.
"I don't know," he said. "Take it all in all, it was the most
extraordinary thing I ever saw. Apparently she never for one second
thought of herself. She simply ran straight into that hideous
danger--while the rest of us could do nothing but put our hands over
our eyes and pray."
"But she'll live, Jim?" the actress asked, and as he nodded a
thoughtful affirmative, she added: "That's something to be thankful
for, at least!"
"Don't be too sure it is," said Ann.
Ten days later Miss Ives came cheerfully into the sunny, big room where
Marian Carter lay. Bandaged, and strapped, and bound, it was a sorry
little Dancing Girl who turned her serious eyes to the actress's face.
But Julie could be irresistible when she chose, and she chose to be her
most fascinating self to-day. Almost reluctantly at first, later with
something of her old gayety, the Dancing Girl's laugh rang out. It
stirred Julie's heart curiously to hear it, and made the little
patient's mother, listening in the next room, break silently into tears.
"But this is what I really came to bring you," said the actress,
presently, laying a score or more of newspaper clippings on the bed.
"You see you are famous! I had my press-agent watch for these, and
they're coming in at a great rate every mail. You see, here's a
nattering likeness of you in a New York daily, and here you are again,
in a Chicago paper!"
"Those aren't of ME," said Marian, smiling.
"It SAYS they are," Julie said. "One says you are petite and dark, and
the other that you are a blond Gibson type. You wouldn't have believed
that your wish could come true so quickly, would you, just the other
day?"
"My wish?" stammered the girl.
"Yes. Don't you remember saying that you wished you could do something
big?" pursued Julie. "You've done a thing that makes the rest of us
feel pretty small, you know. Why, while there was any question of your
getting better, there wasn't a dance given at any of the hotels between
here and Surf Point, and all sorts of people came here with inquiries
every day. This place was absolutely hushed. The maids used to fight
for the privilege of carrying your trays up. None of us thought of
anything but 'How is Miss Carter?' And you'll be 'The young lady who
saved those children from the fire' for the rest of your life wherever
you go!"
Miss Carter was watching her gravely.
"You say I got my wish," she said now, her blue eyes brimming with slow
tears, and her lips trembling. "But--but--you see how I AM, Miss Ives!
Dr. Arbuthnot says I MAY be able to walk in a month or two, but no
swimming or riding or dancing for years--perhaps never. And my
face--it'll always be scarred."
Julie laid a gentle hand on the little helpless fingers.
"But that's part of the process, you know, little girl," said the
actress after a little silence. "I pay one way, perhaps, and you pay
another, but we both pay. Don't you suppose," a smile broke through the
seriousness of her face, "don't you suppose I have my scars, too?"