"That's the joke. None of us could see. Whoever he was he was far back, out of sight. It was awfully exciting to me for I simply adore Pancha Lopez and Charlie Crowder, who knows her so well, says she hasn't an admirer of any kind."
Aunt Ellen came to the surface with,
"Perhaps she's going to get one now."
And Lorry added,
"I hope, if she is, he'll be somebody nice. Mr. Crowder says she's had such a hard life and been so fine and brave all along."
Soon after that Mark left. There had been a time when the first move for departure was as trying as the ordeal of entrance, but he had got beyond that. Tonight he felt that he did it in quite an easy nonchalant way, the ladies, true to a gracious tradition, trailing after him into the hall. It was there that an unexpected blow fell; Chrystie, the _enfant terrible, _delivered it. Gliding about to the hummed refrain of the Castanet song her eye fell on his card. She picked it up and read it:
"Mark D.L. Burrage. What does D.L. stand for?"
It was Mark's habit, when this was asked, to square his shoulders, look the questioner in the eye, and say calmly, "Daniel Lawrence."
But now that fierce loyalty to his own, that chafed pride, that angry rebellion which this house and these girls roused in him, made him savagely truthful. A dark mahogany-red stained his face to the forehead and he looked at Chrystie with a lowering challenge.
"It stands for de Lafayette."