"I'm going to put you in a wheel-chair and let Denny take you up to the north end of the board-walk and tell you all about it while I locate and make comfortable the rest of the folks," Mr. Vandeford answered with a deep relief at her presence in his eyes.
"Where are my girls?" she questioned.
"Both dead—asleep," he answered, as if deeply happy to be able to say it of his star and his author.
His statement was only partly true, for while Miss Adair slept the sleep of the emotionally unanxious, Mildred Lindsey sat crouched by her window, with her eyes looking far out over the Atlantic Ocean, waiting for the result of Mr. Dennis Farraday's talk with his mother at the north end of the board-walk.
There are occasionally mothers who bear sons who can tell them all about things, and Mrs. Farraday really enjoyed the whole story that big, bonnie Dennis poured out to her at the sunset hour by the brink of old ocean, Dago Italiana squatting on his heels out of hearing and basking in inactivity, from the moment of the beefsteak episode in his and Miss Lindsey's acquaintance up to the moment in which Miss Hawtry had established herself in his arms on the occasion of his début in a stage dressing-room. And even at that stage of the narration she rather astonished Mr. Farraday, who was shamefaced enough at the telling, by saying with soft pity in her motherly voice:
"The poor woman. Of course she couldn't help loving you, and now she's lost both Van and you. Now go on and tell me about Mildred."
"She—she's the best ever," was Mr. Farraday's explicit and enlightening answer.
"Of course she is. I saw that the time you brought her to dinner with me, and also that you were in love with her. She's really a rather wonderful girl, and—and—Dennis, I'll tell you something that I never expected to tell you—I've always wanted to be an actress. I simply adore that Lindsey girl, and I know she'll make a great actress. Why on earth should she want to marry you?" Which goes to show that aristocratic Mrs. Farraday was not the ordinary mother.
"Let's go ask her," roared big Dennis, as he embraced her in a way that made the sympathetic and now wealthy young Dago Italiana flash his white teeth in joy.
And nobody can say how much the fate of "The Purple Slipper" was affected by the fact that Rosalind went upon the stage for her first appearance as a star, straight from the tender arms of stately, white-haired Mrs. Farraday.