Actresses -- Fiction; Americans -- England -- Fiction; Love stories; Mate selection -- Fiction
“Gordon said that the boy’s father treated him like a king, and that
while the boy is here he is going to look out for him.”
Over her shoulder the other threw out coldly:
“You speak as though he were in a den of thieves. I didn’t know Gordon’s
honor was so fine. As for me, _I_ don’t gamble, you know.”
Lady Galorey had decided that Lily’s insistent remaining gave her a
chance to fill her fountain pen. She was, therefore, carefully squirting
in the ink, and she flushed at her friend’s last words.
Lady Galorey herself was the best bridge player in London, and cards
were her passion. She did not remind the lady in the window that there
were other games besides bridge, but kept both her tongue and her
temper.
After a little silence in which the women followed each her own
thoughts, the duchess murmured:
“I’ll toddle up-stairs, Edie—let you write. Where did you say we were
going to meet the guns for food?”
“At the gate by the White Pastures. There’ll be a cart and a motor
going, whichever you like, around two.”
“Right,” her grace nodded; “I’ll be on time, dearest.”
And Lady Galorey with a relieved sigh heard the door close behind the
duchess. Wiping her fountain pen delicately with a bit of chamois, she
murmured: “Well, Dan Blair _is_ out of Eden, poor dear, if he met her by
the gate.”
A fortune of a round ten million pounds was a small part of what this
young man had come into by direct inheritance from the Copper King of
Blairtown, Montana. For once the money figure had not been exaggerated,
but Lady Galorey did not know about the rest of Dan’s inheritance.
* * * * *
The young man whistling in his rooms in the bachelor quarters of Osdene
Park House, dressed for dinner without the aid of a valet. When Lord
Galorey had asked him “where his manservant was,” Dan had grinned.
“Gosh, I wouldn’t have one of those Johnnies hanging around me—never did
have! I can put on _my_ stockings all right! There was a chap on the
boat I came over in who let his man put on his stockings. Can you beat
that?” Blair had laughed again. “I think if anybody tickled my feet that
way I would be likely to kick him in the eye.”
Dressing in his room he whistled under his breath a song from a newly
popular comic opera; and he intoned with his clear young voice a line of
the words:
“_Should-you-go-to-Mandalay._”
Out through his high window, if he had looked, he would have seen the
misty sweep of the park under the faint moonrise and fine shadows that
the leaves made in the veiled light, but he did not look out. He was
dressing for dinner without a valet and giving a great deal of care to
his toilet; for the first time he was to dine in the house of a nobleman
and in the presence of a duchess; not that it meant a great deal to
him—he thought it was “funny.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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