and then Patsy O’Connell geared up her wits, as any true kinswoman of Dan’s should. In a flash there came back to her what the [Pg 43]company had done once when they were playing one-night stands and the wrong scenery had come for the play advertised. It was worth trying here. [Pg 43] “Dear people,” said Patsy O’Connell-St. Regis, smiling at the audience as one friend to another, “I have had so many requests from among you—since I made out my program—to give instead an evening of old Irish tales, that I have—capitulated; you shall have your wish.” The almost unbelievable applause that greeted her tempted her to further wickedness. “Very few people seem ever to remember that I had an Irish grandfather, Denis St. Regis, and that I like once in a while to be getting back to the sod.” There was something so hypnotic in her intimacy—this taking of every one into her confidence—that one budding youth forgot himself entirely and naïvely remarked, “It’s a long way to Tipperary.” That clinched her success. She might have chanted “Old King Cole” and reaped a houseful of applause. As it was, she turned faery child and led them all forth to the Land of Faery—a world that neighbored so close to the real with her that long ago she had acquired the habit of carrying a good bit of it about with her wherever she went. It was small wonder, therefore, that, [Pg 44]at the end of the evening, when she fixed upon a certain young man in the audience—a man with a persevering mustache, an esthetic face, and a melancholy, myopic squint—and told the last tale to him direct, that he felt called upon to go to her as she came down the steps into the ball-room and express his abject, worshipful admiration. [Pg 44] “That’s all right,” Patsy cut him short, “but—but—it would sound so much nicer outside, somewhere in the moonlight—away from everybody. Wouldn’t it, now?” This sudden amending of matter-of-factness with arch coquetry would have sounded highly amusing to ears less self-atuned than the erstwhile wearer of the Balmacaan. But he heard in it only the flattering tribute to a man chosen of men; and the hand that reached for Patsy’s was almost masterful. “Oh, would you really?” he asked, and he almost broke his melancholy with a smile. “It must be my clothes,” was her mental comment as he led her
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