“Listen, girlie,” he said comfortingly. “I know just how you feel—the cards ain’t runnin’ right and you want to quit the game, but I’m going to cut in with a clean deck and start a new deal. I’m goin’ to fix things so that when you do go back for a visit to the little old home town and dear old dad, the Peerless Silver Cornet band is goin’ to be down at the station and his honor the mayor is goin’ to speak a few well chosen words of welcome in the presence of a cheering crowd of friends and well-wishers. Leave it to me.” Lolita laughed a little in spite of her mood. “You’re a great little jollier, Jimmy,” she, said, “and I’d like to believe you, but somehow I can’t. I’m a nobody, a Cedar Rapids’ nobody.” “But you’re goin’ to be little Miss Lolita Somebody of the well known world,” he responded cheerily, “before I get through with you. I’m goin’ to drop you right into the direct center of the front page of every paper in the U.S.A. from the New York Gazette to the Wyalusing, Pa., Rocket. You’re goin’ to make those two chaps with the whiskers on the cough drop boxes and that fat old colored dame in the pancake flour ads look like shrinkin’ violets on a foggy afternoon when I finish up with you. You just wait and see.” “How long have I got to wait, Jimmy,” ventured Lolita who was adrift in the realms of fancy, carried thence by the soothing cadences of Jimmy’s voice. “Only until some afternoon when this June Delight person fails to show up,—I hear she’s talkin’ of layin’ off for a few days. If you’ll promise not to even talk about it in your sleep I’ll hand you a little advance information.” Only the silent stars and the discreet moon shared Jimmy’s confidence with Lolita. Its general tone and tenor lifted that despairing daughter of the plains out of the rut of hopeless striving into which she felt she had fallen and filled her with such anticipatory delight that when she said good-bye at the door of her boarding house she impulsively reached forward and kissed him full on the mouth. “You’re a darling,” she murmured. “I’ll take an encore on that, girlie,” he replied. And he did. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Chapter Two Miss June Delight summoned Manager McClintock to her dressing room just before the Saturday night performance and successfully simulated the classic symptoms of impending nervous prostration while she sniffed at a vial of smelling salts and submitted to the ministrations of a tired maid who gently massaged her forehead with her finger-tips. Miss Delight, in a voice that was barely audible, informed the manager that she could not possibly endure the trying ordeal of further performances after that evening without a brief period of rest and that she was leaving for a week’s stay at a sanitarium on the following morning.