It was simply grand to have money! It makes you feel like a queen to fling it around as if it were paper. After I had spent almost a hundred dollars Miss Davis thought I was an heiress in disguise, and to carry out the part I left the whole of fifty cents as a tip for our waiter at luncheon. I told Miss Davis to pick out the most popular play in New York for us to see. We bought the best seats in the house.
Never, never as long as I live shall I forget those two hours and a half of perfect happiness! I'd never seen anything but vaudeville in my life, and I almost cry now when I think of that play. It was perfectly grand. The hero kept looking right straight at me all the time and what do you think? What do you suppose? He was the very actor whose pictures I had cut out and stuck in my mirror! He was Robert K. Dwinnell, and I hadn't known until I was inside the theatre and looked at the program that he was in New York. It seemed to me too strange a coincidence to be true. I don't believe in omens, but Miss Davis told me afterward she hadn't the slightest idea that I had been collecting his pictures. After that play I could hardly speak. The queer grey light of day after the glow of the footlights, didn't seem real. Boarding-school and all the girls seemed trifling. I couldn't think of anything except Robert Dwinnell and that play all the way back in the train. I felt that I was the beautiful heroine instead of Lucy Vars. I felt her joy at meeting her lover instead of my anguish at going back to a lot of unfriendly girls. I lived and breathed in the action of the plot I had just seen. I couldn't get away from it. Before I boarded the train that night I dragged Miss Davis into a small shop which we passed on the way to the station, and with the last fifty cents of Alec's one hundred dollars I bought a real picture of Robert Dwinnell. The picture is here now in this very cupola, in the top drawer of my desk and is the only comfort that I have. Mr. Dwinnell is sitting on the edge of a table swinging one foot, just as he did in the play—I remember the place in the third act—and his eyes are looking right at me.
I wonder, oh, I wonder sometimes, if he and I will ever meet.
CHAPTER VI
IT was about a week before the Christmas vacation that my last outbreak at boarding-school occurred. It was one noon after lunch when I was passing through the hall on my way upstairs. I had to go by Sarah Platt's room, where the little clique of girls I had once longed to be one of, used often to congregate after luncheon before the two o'clock study-hour. They were gathered there to-day, talking and laughing together in their usual mysterious manner, and I wondered vaguely as I went by, what they were discussing now. I never allowed myself to listen intentionally, but the conversation of those girls, who were still strangers to me, always fascinated me, and I confess I used to overhear all that I could without being dishonourable. As I sauntered by the half-closed door of that room I recognised the voice of Sarah Platt herself, who of all the girls I had aspired to make my best friend. Sarah was a dashing kind of girl and would show off to awfully good advantage before my family if I had invited her to visit me.
"Well," I heard her say, "I think Miss Brown is taking her in on charity."
I knew Sarah must be referring to me and I stopped stock-still.
"Why, she hasn't anything, and this horrid place is probably a palace to her!"