“Um ... I don’t know.”
Letty Lane flashed a look at him. “Oh,” she said coolly, “I guess she won’t pay the price then.”
Dan said: “Yes, she will; yes, she will, all right.”
“Now,” Letty Lane went on, “if it were a charity affair, I could sing for nothing, and I don’t doubt the duchess, if she is as benevolent as you say she is, could get me up some kind of a charity show.”
Dan, who had started to rise, now leaned toward her and said: “Don’t you worry about it a bit. If you’ll come and sing we will make it right about the price and the charity; everything shall go your way.”
She was seized upon by a violent fit of coughing, and Dan leaned toward her and put his arm around her as a brother might have done, holding her tenderly until the paroxysm was past.
“Gosh!” he exclaimed fervently, “it’s heartbreaking to hear you cough like that and to think of your working as you do. Can’t you stop and take a good rest? Can’t you go somewhere?”
“To Greenland’s icy mountains?” she responded, smiling. “I hate the cold.”
“No, no; to some golden sands or other,” he murmured under his breath. “And let me take you there.”
But she pushed him back, laughing now. “No golden sands for me. I’m afraid I’ve got to sing in Mandalay to-night.”