“It’s not a new song,” he told her. “In fact, it’s more than twenty years old. An orchestra leader named Orrin Tucker dug it out of the file and gave it to his little five-foot singing doll named Bonnie Baker. It’s gone across America like a Nebraska cyclone. This is it: “Oh! Johnny! Oh! Johnny! How you can love! Oh! Johnny! Oh! Johnny! Heavens above.” “Catchy,” said Cherry, beginning to hum it. Catchy was right, and Cherry was the one person in all the world to set England on fire with it. That night in the chill damp of the subway, she sang it over and over. Next day in the airdromes and factories, barracks, schools, stores and on the street, one might hear: “Oh! Johnny! Oh! Johnny!” The song was made. So too was Cherry. In the days that followed she was to become the sweetheart of all England. Newspapers were to print her picture in color. These pictures were to appear on the rough board walls of cantonments all over England, and in the cabins of boats, large and small, sailing the dangerous North Sea. She was to be taken up by the nobility. Lady Perkins, a friend of the Young Lord, who lived in London, was to make her a part of her household, with privilege of coming and going as she pleased. Only now and then did she sleep with some working girls in the subway. Most nights after the “all clear” had sounded, she sped away to creep beneath downy covers in a wing of Lady Perkins’ mammoth old home. “It’s not that I crave magnificence,” she confided to Dave, “It’s just that I must have rest. It—well, you see—it all must seem so simple and easy, my singing. And it truly is, but,”—she heaved a sigh—“when it’s all over, I’m a rag.” “I know,” Dave agreed. “It’s always that way. The thing you do with apparent ease because you have yourself under perfect carefree control, is just the thing that takes it out of you.” By himself later, Dave recalled words of a great old poem: “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, And walk with kings, nor lose the common touch,—” “That,” he told himself, “is just what Cherry can do. And nothing can ever spoil her.” If he had quoted from that same poem: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same,—” he would have been telling Cherry’s fortune, for Cherry was to meet with both Triumph and Disaster. _Chapter_ XII “The House Is Gone” It happened, or shall we say began, on a Sunday night. During the many days previous to this, things had picked up little by little in Cherry’s subway radio studio. One evening the little Irish girl who played the piano had brought in a young fellow with a shabby violin case under his arm. “Can you play it?” Cherry asked. “A little,” was the modest reply.