When Dan, on the minute of two, went to the Savoy, Higgins, as was her
custom, did not meet him. Miss Lane met him herself. She was reading a
letter by the table, and when Dan was announced she put it back in its
envelope. Blair had seen her only in soft clinging evening dresses, in
white visionary clothes, or in her dazzling part costume, where the play
dress of the dancer displayed her beauty and her charms. To-day she wore
a tailor-made gown, and in her dark cloth dress, in her small hat, she
seemed a new woman--some one he hadn't known and did not know, and he
experienced the thrill a man always feels when the woman he loves
appears in an unaccustomed dress and suggests a new mystery.
"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."