Dan glanced up at Mrs. Higgins.
“Why, that looks as though this were for me.”
The dressing woman nodded. “Miss Lane thought she would be able to see you to-day.”
The picture in his hand, Dan gazed at it rapturously.
“I’m from Blairtown, Montana, where she came from.”
“So she told me, sir.”
He laid the picture back on the table, and Higgins understood that he wanted Miss Lane to give it to him herself. She led him affably to the door and affably smiled upon him. She had a frill in her hand, a thimble on her finger, and a lot of needles in her bodice. She looked motherly and useful. Blair liked to think of her with Letty Lane. He put his hand in his pocket, but she saw his gesture and reproved him quietly: “No, no, sir, please, I never do. I am just as much obliged,” and her face remained so affable that Blair was not embarrassed by her refusal. His parting words were:
“Now, you make her take care of herself.”
And to please him, as she opened the door, she pleasantly assured him that she would do her very best.
Dan went out of the Savoy feeling that he had left something of himself behind him in the motley room of an actress with its perfumed atmosphere of roses and violets. The photograph which he had laid down on the table seemed to look out at him again, and he repeated delightedly, “That one was for me, all right! I’m the ‘boy from her town’ and no mistake.” And he thought of her as she had lain, lifelessly and pale on the dressing-room sofa, under the touch of hired hands, and how, no doubt, she had been lying in her room when he called to-day, with shades drawn, resting before the long hard evening, when London would be amused by her, delighted by her, charmed by her voice, by her body and her grace. He had wandered up as far as Piccadilly, went into a florist’s and stood before the flowers. Her sitting-room had been full of roses, but Dan chose something else that had caught his eye from the window,—a huge country basket of primroses, smelling of the earth and the spring. He sent them with his card and wrote on it, “To the Girl from My Town,” and sent the gift with a pleasure as young and as fresh as was his own heart.