At that she shoved her pink toes beneath covers of silk filled with eiderdown and slept the sleep of perfect peace, while out there by the shores of Lake Michigan fifty thousand happy people romped through the sunshine of a bright summer’s day.
CHAPTER IV
THE GOLDEN TEMPLE
Why did Petite Jeanne sleep all day to haunt strange places in the night? Who can say? Why do certain birds deep in the forest sing only at night? Why do all manner of wild things choose the night for their joyous frolics? Jeanne was as wild by nature as any of these, for had she not lived the very early years of her life with the gypsies? And is it not at night that the gypsies dance, sing and tell fortunes round the camp fire?
She did not leave her room, this little French girl, until night shadows had fallen and automobile lights like twin stars were blinking their way down the boulevard.
When she did leave she carried a well filled laundry bag. Yet, strange to say, she did not carry this bag to a laundry depository, but to a hotel two blocks away. Here she entrusted its care to a smiling check boy. The boy’s smile broadened when she slipped him a bright new dollar bill with a whispered,
“I may not call for it for oh, so long. You keep it till I come. Yes?”
The boy grinned and nodded. Such occurrences were not new to him. Many young ladies entrusted their secrets to him. “But this girl,” he told himself, “is different. I wonder—”
He had little time to wonder. He thrust Jeanne’s bag far back in a deep recess and straightway forgot it; which is, after all, just the proper thing for a check boy to do.
Jeanne did not leave the hotel at once; instead, she took the elevator to the top floor, then walking to a window, looked away toward the lake front.
Though she had looked upon the scene before, she could not suppress a low exclamation of awe: “Magnificent!”