The object of this remark, having just told a story that elicited a round of laughter, turned carelessly and swept the room with a brilliant, experienced glance. The searchlight passed the porter and bell boys, the obsequious clerk at the desk, the semicircle of admirers at the fire, and came to an audacious pause when it reached Donald Morley.
He was lighting a cigarette at the moment, and presented an appearance of colossal indifference to all stars, terrestrial and celestial. But when he had tossed the match into the open grate, he nonchalantly sauntered to the desk and glanced at the register.
There was the dashing signature, the ink still wet on the flourish,
“La Florine.”
It was Cropsie Decker's old flame, “The Serpent of the Nile,” whom he had last seen poised on the cork of a champagne bottle on a poster on Billy-goat Hill! Without looking up he was aware that the same mischievous eyes which had peeped through the black-gloved fingers on the poster, were watching him now with the liveliest interest. They followed him across the room, they laughed at him over the shoulder of the man in the checked suit, they flung a challenge at his feet, and dared him pick it up.
Donald watched her with increasing fascination. It was good just to be near anything so careless, and gay, and irresponsible. He, too, had once poised tiptoe on the perilous edge of things, and laughed defiance in the face of Fate. Why shouldn't he do it again? A man about to be hanged is given a last good dinner, why shouldn't he humor himself to one more good time before the die was cast on the morrow?
It would only be necessary to present his card and mention Cropsie Decker, and the rest would be easy. He had just about enough money to pay for a theater ticket, and a cozy little supper afterward. But what about flowers?
He thrust his hand eagerly into his pocket on an investigating tour. As he did so his ringers encountered a small, hard object which he drew forth and looked at curiously. It was the dried hip of a wild rose, that had been transferred from pocket to pocket since the day it dared to bloom before its time, in a cranny of the stone wall that circled the garden at Thornwood. The touch of it brought back an old barrel hammock under the lilacs, and the glowing eyes of a girl, lifted to his with a look of trusting innocence.
Without another glance at “The Serpent of the Nile,” he turned up his coat collar, pulled his hat over his eyes and plunged out into the wet, dismal street. For hours he tramped, neither knowing nor caring where he went. He was fighting the hardest fight a man is called on to fight, the fight against himself with no reward in view.
When he got back to his room, spent and disheveled at nine o'clock, he found two letters under his door. One, a black-bordered envelope addressed in Connie's familiar scrawl, he thrust into his pocket, smiling in spite of himself at the memory of Miss Lady's bargain stationery. The other, a long, bulky envelope, bearing the device of a well-known magazine, caused him to sit limply down on his steamer-trunk and gaze at it miserably.