spirits. At any rate there was a ring in him, an equilibrium that surprised Galorey.
“‘Most things,’ dad said to me, ‘go back to the earth.’” He struck the English turf with his stick. “Dad said a fellow had better buy those things that stay above the ground.” Dan smiled frankly at his companion. “Curious thing to say, wasn’t it?” he reflected. “I remembered it, and I got to wondering after I saw him buried, ‘what are the things that stay above the ground?’ The old man never gave me another talk like that.”
After a few seconds Galorey put in:
“But, my dear chap, you did give me a shock up there just now when you said you were going to spend ‘all your money on some girl.’”
The millionaire took a chestnut from his pocket. He held it high above his head and the little dog that had been yelping at his heels fixed his eyes on it. Blair poised it, then threw it as far as he could. It sped through the air and the terrier ran like mad across the park.
“I like girls awfully, Gordon, and when I find the right one, why, then I’m going to feel what a bully thing it is to be rich.”
Lord Galorey groaned aloud.
“My dear chap!” he exclaimed.
The spell of the day, the fragrant beauty of the time and place and hour were clearly upon Dan Blair. Lord Galorey was sympathetic to him. The terrier came tearing back with the chestnut held between his thick jaws. Dan bent down to take the nut from the dog and wrestled with him gently.
“Swell little grip he’s got. Nice old pup! Let it go now!” And he threw the nut far again, and as the terrier ran once more Blair thrust his hands down in his pockets and began softly to whistle the tune of Mandalay.
He said slowly, going back to his subject: “It must be great to feel that a fellow can give her jewels like the Duchess of Breakwater’s, ropes of ’em” – he nodded toward the house – “and a fine old place like this now, and motors and yachts and all kinds of stuff.”
His eyes rested on the suave lines of the Elizabethan house, with its softened gables and its banked terraces. Possibly his vivid imagination pictured “some nice girl” there waiting, as they should come up, to meet him.
“I have always thought it would be bully to find a poor girl – pretty as a peach, of course – one who had never had much, and just cover her with things. Hey, there!” he cried to the terrier, who had come running back, “bring it to me.”
They had come up to the terrace by this, and Dan’s confidence, fresh as a gush of water from a rock, had ceased. His face was placid. He didn’t realize what he had said.
From out of one of the long windows, dressed in a sable coat, her small head tied up in a motor scarf, the Duchess of Breakwater appeared. She greeted them severely, and Lord Galorey hear her say under her breath to Dan:
“You promised to be back to drive with me before dinner, Dan. Did you forget?”
And as Galorey left the boy to make his peace, the first smile of amusement broke over his face. He felt that the duchess had between her and her capture of Dan Blair’s heart the elusive picture of some “nice girl” – not much perhaps, but it might be very hard to tear away the picture of the ideal that was ever before the blue eyes of this man who had a fortune to spend on her!
CHAPTER II – THE DUCHESS APPROVES
His attentions to the Duchess of Breakwater had not been so conspicuous or so absorbing as to prevent the eager mothers – who, true to her word, Lady Galorey had invited down – from laying siege to Dan Blair. Lady Galorey asked him:
“Don’t you want to marry any one of these beauties, Dan?” And Blair, with his beautiful smile and what Lily called his inspired candor, answered:
“Not on your life, Lady Galorey!”
And she agreed, “I think myself you are too young.”
“No,” Dan refuted, “you are wrong there. I shall marry as fast as I can.”
His hostess was surprised.
“Why, I thought you wanted your fling first.”
And Dan, from his chair, in which, with a book, he had been sitting when Lady Galorey found him, answered cheerfully:
“Oh, I don’t like being alone. I want to go about with some one. I should like a fling all right, but I want to fling with somebody as I go.”
The lady of the house was not a philosopher nor an analyst. She had certain affairs of her own and was engrossed in them and lived in them. As far as Lady Galorey was concerned the rest of the world might go and hang itself as long as it didn’t do it at her gate-post. But Blair couldn’t leave any one indifferent to him very long, not unless one could be indifferent to a blaze of sunlight; one must either draw the blinds down or bask in its brightness.
She laughed. “You’re perfectly delicious! You mean to say you want to be married at once and let your wife fling around with you?”
“Just that.”
“How sweet of you, Dan! And you won’t marry one of these girls here?”
“Don’t fill the bill, Lady Galorey.”
“Oh, you have a sweetheart at home, then?”
“All off!” he assured her blithely, and rose, tall and straight and slender.
The Duchess of Breakwater had come in, indeed she never failed to when there was any question of finding Blair.
Dan stood straightly before the two women of an old race, and the American didn’t suggest any line of noble ancestors whatsoever. His features were rather agglomerate; his muscles were possibly not the perfect elastic specimens that were those muscles whose strain and sinew had been made from the same stock for generations. He was, nevertheless, very good to look on. Any woman would have thought so, and he bent his blond head as he looked at the Duchess of Breakwater with something like benevolence, something of his father’s kindness in his clear blue eyes. Neither of the noble ladies vaguely understood him. His hostess thought him “a good sort,” not half bad, a splendid catch, and the other woman, only a few years his senior, was in love with him. The duchess had married at eighteen, tired of her bargain at twenty, and found herself a widow at twenty-five. She held a telegram in her hand.
“We’ve got the box for Mandalay to-night at the Gaiety, and let’s motor in.”
Only Lady Galorey hesitated, disappointed.
“Too bad – I had specially arranged for Lady Grandcourt to drive over with Eileen. I thought it would be a ripping chance for her to see Dan.”
When at length the duchess had succeeded in getting Dan to herself toward the end of the day in the red room, after tea, she said:
“So you won’t marry a London beauty?”
And rather coldly Dan had answered:
“Why, you talk, all of you, as if I had only to ask any girl of them, and she would jump down my throat.”
“Don’t try it,” the duchess answered, “unless you want to have your mouth full!”
