She gave him a big chair and sat down before him smiling. Leaning her elbows on her knees, she sank her face upon her hands and looked at him, not coquettishly in the least, but as a child might have looked. From her small feet to her golden head she was utterly charming. [Image] Ruggles made himself think of Dan. Miss Lane spoke slowly, nodding toward him, in her languid voice: “It’s no use, Mr. Ruggles, no use.” Holding her face between her hands, her eyes gray as winter’s seas and as profound, she looked at him intently; then, in a flash, she changed her position and instantly transformed her character. He saw that she was a woman, not an eighteen-year-old girl, but a woman, clever, poised, witty, understanding, and that she might have been twenty years older than the boy. “I’m sorry you spoke so quick,” he said. “I knew,” she interrupted, “just what you wanted to say from the start. I couldn’t help it, could I? I knew you would want to come and see me about it. It isn’t any use. I know just what you are going to say.” “No, ma’am,” he returned, “I don’t believe you do—bright as you are.” Ruggles gazed thoughtfully at the cold end of his unlighted cigar. It was a comfort to him to hold it and to look at it, although not for anything in the world would he have asked to light it. “Dan’s father and me were chums. We went through pretty much together, and I know how he felt on most points. He was a man of few words, but I know he counted on me to stand By the boy.” Ruggles was so chivalrous that his rôle at present cost him keen discomfort. “A lady like you,” he said gently, “knows a great deal more about how things are done than either Dan or me. We ain’t tenderfeet in the West, not by a long shot, but we see so few of a certain kind of picture shows that when they do come round they’re likely to make us lose our minds! You know, yourself, a circus in a town fifty miles from a railroad drives the people crazy. Now, Dan’s a little like the boy with his eyes on the hole in the tent. He would commit murder to get inside and see that show.” He nodded and smiled to her as though he expected her to follow his crude simile. “Now, I have seen _you_ a lot of times.” And she couldn’t help reminding him, “Not of your own accord, Mr. Ruggles.” “Well, I don’t know,” he slowly admitted; “I always felt I had my money’s worth, and the night you ate with us at the Carlton I understood pretty well how the boy with his eyes at the tent hole would feel.” But he tapped his broad chest with the hand that held the cigar between the first and second fingers. “I know just what kind of a heart you’ve got, for I waited at the stage door and I know you don’t get all your applause inside the Gaiety Theater.” “Goodness,” she murmured, “they make an awful fuss about nothing.”