“Dear Boy: I have been suddenly called back to the United States. As I didn’t know how to get at you, I couldn’t. I had a cable that takes me right back. I get the Lusitania at Liverpool and you can send me a Marconi. Better make the first boat you can and come over.
“Joshua Ruggles.”
Ruggles left no word of advice, and unconscious of this master stroke on the part of the old man, whose heart yearned for him as for his own son, Dan folded the note up and thought no more about Ruggles.
When an hour later he came out of the Carlton he was prepared for the life of the evening. He stopped at the telephone desk and sent a telegram to Ruggles on the Lusitania:
“Can’t come yet a while; am engaged to be married to the Duchess of Breakwater.”
He wrote this out in full and the man at the Marconi “sat up” and smiled as he wrote. With Letty Lane’s badly written note in his pocket, and wondering very much at her summons of him, Dan drove to the Gaiety, and at the end of the third act went back of the scenes. There were several people in her dressing-room. Higgins was lacing her into a white bodice and Miss Lane, before her glass, was putting the rouge on her lips.
“Hello, you,” she nodded to Dan.
“I am awfully sorry not to have shown up at five. Just got your note. Just got in at the hotel; been out of town all day.”
Dan saw that none of the people in the room was familiar to him, and that they were out of place in the pretty brocaded nest. One of them was a Jew, a small man with a glass eye, whose fixed stare rested on Miss Lane. He had kept on his overcoat, and his derby hat hung on the back of his head.