Among the names of the winners was that of Monica Hanson.
The following day Monica attended the final competition. She did her utmost, spurred on by the driving necessity which had just been thrust upon her brave young shoulders. Now she was sitting in the San Sabatano Horticultural Gardens waiting for the evening issue of the paper which was to tell her, in cold, hard type, the news which was either to crush her eager young soul in despair, or uplift her to realms of ecstatic hope and delight.
Oh, the teeming thought of those straining moments. It flew through her brain with lightning-like velocity, spasmodic, broken. One moment she had visions of pleasures hitherto denied her in a solitary career, eked out on a wholly inadequate pittance doled out to her monthly by her dead mother's solicitors in far-off New York. At another she was obsessed by the haunting conviction that such good fortune was impossible. Yet she felt she had done well in the examination, and, anyway, she would certainly take that five hundred dollars she had already won in preference to the European tour. It would mean so much to her, especially now—now that this fresh call on her resources had been made.
After long disquieting moments she finally sprang up from her seat. Her nerves were getting the better of her. She thought she heard the raucous call of the newsboy. She listened; her pretty brows drawn together in plaintive doubt. Yes, no—her heart was thumping under the white lawn shirtwaist she was wearing, in spite of the fact that it was still winter. But winter in San Sabatano was as pleasant as many another town's summer. In all the history of that beautiful southern Californian town the thermometer had never been known to register freezing point.
She made a pretty picture standing there amid a setting of fantastic tropical vegetation. The cacti, great and small, with their wonder-hued blooms and strange vegetation, were a fitting background to the girl's golden beauty. She was quite southern in her coloring, that wonderful tone of rich gold underlying a fair almost transparent skin. Her waving, fair hair shone with a rich, ruddy burnish, crowning a face of perfect oval, lit with eyes of the deepest blue, which shone with pronounced intelligence and strength.
No, her nerves had not played tricks with her. It was the newsboy. She could see him now, just beyond the park gates. He was selling his papers all too fast. So, with tumultuous feeling's, and a heart hammering violently against her young bosom, she darted off to catch him.
She reached the gates and slackened her pace to a decorous walk. The boy had just handed an elderly man his paper, and was searching for the odd cents of change waited for. Having paid his customer off he looked admiringly up into Monica's pale face.
His shrewd eyes grinned impishly, and he winked abundantly, so that the whole of one side of his face became painfully distorted.
"Say, ain't you Miss Hanson, Miss?" he inquired, with the effrontery of his kind.
Monica's heart beat harder. But she replied with an icy calmness.