Patsy returned the letters to their envelopes and marveled that her new-found prosperity should affect her so drearily. Why was she not elated, transported with the surprise and the sudden promise of success? She was free to go now to a good hotel and sign for a room and three regular meals a day. She could wire at once to Miss Gibbs, of the select boarding-house, and have her trunk down in twenty-four hours. In very truth, her days of vagabondage were over, yet the fact brought her no happiness.
She hunted Felton up at the hotel and explained her absence: “Just a week-end at one of the fashionable places. No, not exactly professional. No, not social either. You might call it—providential, like this.”
The morning was spent meeting her fellow-players—going over the text, trying on the St. Regis costumes, adjourning at last to the estate of Peterson-Jones.
Until the middle of the afternoon they were busy with rehearsals: the mental tabulating of new stage business, the adapting of strange stage property, the accustoming of one’s feet to tread gracefully over roots and tangling vines and slippery patches of pine needles instead of a good stage flooring. And through all this maze Patsy’s mind played truant. A score of times it raced off back to the road again, to wait between a stretch of woodland and a grove of giant pines for the coming of a grotesque, vagabond figure in rags.
“Come, come, Miss O’Connell; what’s the matter?” Felton’s usual patience snapped under the strain of her persistent wit-wandering. “I’ve had to tell you to change that entrance three times.”
“Aye—and what is the matter?” Patsy repeated the question remorsefully. “Maybe I’ve acquired the habit of taking the wrong entrance. What can you expect from any one taking seven days to go seven miles. I’m dreadfully sorry. If you’ll only let me off this time I promise to remember to-morrow; I promise!”
The day had been growing steadily hotter and more sultry. By five o’clock every one who was doing anything, and could stop doing it, went slothfully about looking for cool spots and cooler drinks. Burgeman senior, alone with his servants on the largest estate in Arden, ordered one of the nurses to wheel him to the border of his own private lake—a place where breezes blew if there were any about—and leave him there alone until Fitzpatrick, his lawyer, came from town. And there he was sitting, his eyes on nothing at all, when Patsy scrambled up the bank of the lake and dropped breathless under a tree—not three feet from him.
“Merciful Saint Patrick! I never saw you! Maybe I’m trespassing, now?”