"IF I WERE A KING I WOULD RAISE HER TO MY THRONE!"
"As shines the moon in cloudless skies,
She in her poor attire was seen,
One praised her ankles, one her eyes,
One her dark hair, and lovesome mien,
So sweet a face, such angel grace,
In all that land had never been;
Cophetua swore a royal oath,
'This beggar maid shall be my queen!'"
TENNYSON.
But, leaving our interests in the Garden City temporarily, we must
journey across the dark-blue sea, to follow the fortunes of our noble
hero, Harry Hawthorne.
As the intelligent reader has doubtless surmised already, he was
the hero of the newspaper paragraph Mrs. Fitzgerald had read to her
daughter, and he had crossed the seas to claim his own.
Young blood is often too hot, and an angry quarrel with his old father
had made the heir of a noble name and fine estate a voluntary exile
from home under distant skies, where he was not too proud to earn his
bread by honest toil.
But all that was changed now.
In the English county of Devonshire, at the grand old castle home of
Raneleigh, the old lord lay dead, and my lord, his son, must lay aside
his masquerading and come home to wear the honors and the title that
were his by ancestral right.
His two Chicago friends were charmed with his romance when he told it
to them, one day on the steamer, just before they landed on the bonny
shore of England.
"I only borrowed the name of Jack Daly," he laughed. "The one that
belongs to me is Harry Leland, and my title will be Lord Putnam."
They congratulated him warmly. It was a romance in real life, they
said, and Ralph Washburn declared he should weave it into a novel.
"But you do not know the most romantic part of it yet," said the young
man, with a sigh. He debated the question with himself a moment, then
decided it could do no harm to confide in his two noble friends.
So, sadly enough, he told them the story of the love affair that had
brought him to Chicago, keeping back nothing.
"So now you know how I came by the wound that made you two my stanch
friends for life, and you can understand why I let my enemy alone,
rather than bring into publicity the name of a woman I loved," he ended.
"But you left the case in the hands of a detective?" said Leroy Hill.
"Yes, he is to find Clifford Standish and shadow him until it is found
out whether he lied to me about Miss Harding. He has full instructions
to act in my place during my absence."
"And this beautiful girl that you loved when you were simply Harry
Hawthorne, the New York fireman, do you mean that if she is found and
proved innocent that you will stoop to her now that you have come
into your ancestral honors?" inquired the romantic young author, with
interest.
"If I were a king I would raise her to my throne!" replied the ardent
lover, proudly.
They applauded his faithful love, but they thought that the prospect of
his happiness looked very dismal.
The actor's story seemed so plausible that they feared it might be true
that he had won the vacillating heart of pretty Geraldine.
They looked at each other significantly, but they did not have the
heart to breathe their doubts aloud. They saw that he was already
unhappy enough.
But they felt sure in their hearts that if the detective ever traced
the movements of the persons in whom Hawthorne was interested, he would
report Standish's story as true.
When they had been in England a week, having witnessed the joy of the
mother over the truant's return, and had been the recipients of the
most charming hospitalities from the family, a letter came from the
Chicago detective to Lord Putnam.
But the information it contained was very meagre.
He had traced Clifford Standish through a very clever disguise, but the
whereabouts of Miss Harding remained a mystery.
In fact, the detective was inclined to believe that the actor had lost
interest in the girl he had brought to Chicago. Perhaps he had wearied
of her, and left her to despair. At any rate, he was conducting a
correspondence, perhaps a flirtation with a handsome governess, Miss
Erroll, employed by Mrs. Fitzgerald, a wealthy widow, on Prairie avenue.
The pride of Geraldine's mother and her repugnance to the name of
her first husband had induced her, on bringing the girl to Chicago,
to give out to the newspapers the paragraphs for publication stating
that her daughter, Miss Fitzgerald, had been called home from school
by the death of her father. Even in the household Geraldine bore the
same name, and thus the clever detective was baffled by the simple
substitution of another name; and while he had traced Clifford Standish
up to his very entrance to the Prairie avenue mansion, he had no
suspicion that the actor was interested in any one of the family
besides the handsome governess.
But the same mail had brought Lady Putnam also a letter from Chicago,
and when she had read it she called her son into her boudoir, where she
sat alone, saying, in a flutter of excitement:
"I have a letter from America, dear Leland, and as you are so fond of
everything American, perhaps you can remember the beautiful little
American girl to whom you were betrothed when she was only about two
years old?"