“I’m glad you told me,” he answered soberly. “What have you been doing all day?”
“I had a stupid morning at the tailor’s, and a stupid bridge in the afternoon at the Martins’. Oh, I lost a disgraceful lot of money.”
“How much?” he inquired.
She shook her head. “I won’t tell; but that’s why I told Dad he must take me to see something cheerful this evening.”
“Tough luck,” he sympathized.
They went in to dinner. Afterward the Stuyvesant car took them all to a vaudeville house, and there, from the rear of a box, Don watched with indifferent interest the usual vaudeville turns. To tell the truth, he would have been better satisfied to have sat at the piano at home and had Frances sing to him. There were many things he had wished to talk over with her. He had not told her about the other men he had met, his adventure on his first business assignment, his search for a place to lunch, or––Miss Winthrop. Until that moment he had not thought of her himself.
A singing team made their appearance and 52 began to sing sentimental ballads concerned with apple blossoms in Normandy. Don’s thoughts went back, strangely enough, to the white-tiled restaurant in the alley. He smiled as he contrived a possible title for a popular song of this same nature. “The White-Tiled Restaurant in the Alley” it might read, and it might have something to do with “Sally.” Perhaps Miss Winthrop’s first name was Sally––it fitted her well enough. She had been funny about that chocolate éclair. And she had lent him two dollars. Unusual incident, that! He wondered where she was to-night––where she went after she left the office at night. Perhaps she was here. He leaned forward to look at the faces of people in the audience. Then the singing stopped, and a group of Japanese acrobats occupied the stage.
Frances turned, suppressing a yawn.
“I suppose one of them will hang by his teeth in a minute,” she observed. “I wish he wouldn’t. It makes me ache.”