might be able to help her in some way or another.” 

 “Me!” She laughed aloud. “Me help Letty Lane? Really—” 

 “Why, you might get her to sing out here,” he suggested. “That would sort of get hold of her; women know how to do those things.” 

 His preposterous simplicity overwhelmed her. She stirred her tea, and said, controlling herself, “Why, what on earth would you have me to say to Letty Lane?” 

 “Oh, just be nice to her,” he suggested. “Tell her to take care of herself and to brace up. Get some nice woman to—” 

 The duchess helped him. “To reform her?” 

 “Do her good,” the boy said gently. 84 

84

 “You’re too silly for words. If you were not such a hopeless child I would be furious with you. Why, my dear boy, she would laugh in your face and in mine.” 

 As the duchess left the tea-table she repeated: “Is this what you came up from London to talk to me about?” 

 And at the touch of her dress as she passed him—at the look she gave him from her eyes, Dan flushed and said honestly: “Why, I told you that she was the only thing that kept me from thinking about you all the time.” 

85CHAPTER IX—DISAPPOINTMENT

85

 Dan Blair had not been back of the scenes at the Gaiety since his first call on the singer. Indeed, though he had told the duchess he pitied Miss Lane, he had not been able to approach her very closely, even in his own thoughts. When she first appeared on his horizon his mind was full of the Duchess of Breakwater, and the singer had only hovered round his more profound feelings for another woman. But Letty Lane was an atmosphere in Dan’s mind which he was not yet able to understand. There was so little left that was connected with his old home, certainly nothing in the British Isles, excepting Ruggles, and to the young man everything from America had its value. Decidedly the nice girl of whom 86 he had spoken to Gordon Galorey, the print-frocked, sun-bonneted type, the ideal girl that Dan would like to marry and to spoil, had not 

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