Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 67, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 March 1912 — THE GIRL from HIS TOWN [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THE GIRL from HIS TOWN

By MARIE VAN VORST

Ofatntes by IL G. KETTNEB

(Coprr>«hH 1910, by The BoLba-MerriU OoJ 25 SYNOPSIS. Dan Blair, the 22-year-old son of the flfty-mllllon-dollar copper king of Blalrtown, Mont., la a guest at the English home of Lady Galorey. Dan’s father had been courteous to Lord Galorey during his visit to the United States and the courtesy Is now being returned to the young man. The youth has an ideal girl in his mind. He meets Lily, Duchess of Breakwater, a beautiful widow, who is attracted by his Immense fortune and takes a liking to her. When Dan was a boy. a girl sang a solo at a church, and he had never forgotten her. The Galoreys Lily and Dan attend a London theater where one Letty Lane Is the star. Dan recognizes her as the girl from his town, ana going behind the scenes Introduces himself and she’ remembers him. He learns that Prince Ponlotowsky Is sultoi and escort to Letty. Lord Galorey and a friend named Ruggles determine to protect the westerner from Lily and other fortune hunters. Young Blair goes to see Lily, he can talk of nothing but Letty and this angers the Duchess. The westerner finds Letty ill from hard work, but she recovers and Ruggles and Dan invite her to supper. She asks Dan to build a home for disappointed theatrical people. Dan visits Lily, for the time forgetting Letty, and later announces his engagement to the duchess. Letty refuses to sing for an entertainment given by Lily. Galorey tells Dan that all Lily cares for Is his money, and it is disclosed that he and the duchess have been mutually In love for years. Letty sings at an aristocratic function, Dan escorting her home. Dan confronts Galorey and Lily together. Later he informs Letty that his engagement with Lily Is broken, asks the singer to marry him, and they become engaged. Ruggles thinks the westerner should not marry a public singer, artd endeavors to Induce Letty to give htan up. She runs away, fearing she is not good enough for Dan. CHAPTER XXV.—Continued. "You say she’s gone?” he questioned. *1 say,” said the boy, “that you’ve been meddling in my affairs with the woman I love. I don’t know what you have said to her, but it’s only your age that keeps me from striking you. Don’t you know,’’ he cried, “that you are spoiling my life? Don’t you know that?" A torrent of feelmg coming to his lips, his eyes suffused, the tears rolled down his face. He walked away into his own room, remained there a few moments, and when he came out again he carried in his hand his valise, which he put down with a bang on the table. More calmly, but still in great anger, he said to his father’s friend: “Now, can you tell me what you’ve done or not?” “Dan,” said Ruggles with difficulty, can —’’ The boy laughed in his face. “Sit down!” he cried. “Why, I think you must have lost your reason. I have chartered a motor car out there and the damned thing, haa .burst a tire and they are fixing it up for me. It will be ready in about two minutes and then I am going to follow wherever she has gone. She crossed to Paris, but I can get there before she can even with this damned accident But, before I go, I want you to tell me what you said.” "Why,” said Ruggles quietly, “I told her you were poor, and she turned you down.” . ' '■ His words were faint “God!” said the boy under his breath. "That’s the way you think about truth. Lie to a woman to save my precious soul! But I expect,” he said; "you think she is so immoral and so bad that she will hurt me. Well,” he said, with great emphasis, "she has never done anything in her life that comes up to what you’ve done. Never! And nothing has ever hurt me so.” - His lips trembled. *! have lost my respect for you, for my father’s friend, and as far as she is concerned, I don’t care what she marries me for. She has got to marry me, and if she doesn’t”—he had no idea, in his passion, what he was saying or how—--why, I think 11l kill you first and then blow my own brains out!” And with mad words he grabbed up his valise and bolted from the room, and Ruggles could hear his running feet tearing down the corridor. CHAPTER XXVI. White and Coral. Spring in Paris, which comes in a fashion so divine that even the most calloused and indifferent are impressed by its beauty, awakened no answering response in the heart of the young man who, from his hotel Window, "looked out on the desecrated gardens of the Tuileries—-on the distant spires of churches whose names he did not know —on the square block of old palaces. , He had missed the boat across the channel taken by Letty Lane, add the delay had made him lose what little trace of her he had In the early hours of the morning be had flung himself in at the St James, taken the indifferent room they could give him in the crowded Besson, and excited as be was he slept

and did not waken until noon. Blair thought it would be a matter of a few hours only to find the whereabouts of the celebrated actress, but it was not such an easy job. He had not guessed that she might be traveling incognito, and at none of the hotels could he hear news of her, nor did he pass her in the crowded, noisy, rustling, crying streets, though he searched motors for her with eager eyes, and haunted restaurants and cases, and went everywhere that he thought she might be likely to be. At the end of the third day, unsuccessful and in despair, having hardly slept and scarcely eaten, the unhappy* young lover found himself taking a slight luncheon in the little restaurant known as the Perouse down on the Quais. His head on his hand, for the present moment the joy of life gone from him, he looked out through the windows at the Seine, at the bridge and the lines of flowering trees He yas the only occupant of the upper room where, of late, he had ordered his luncheon. _— The tide of life rolled slowly in this quieter part of the city, and as Blair sat there under the window there passed a piper playing a shrill, sweet tune. It was no different from any of the loud metropolitan clamors, with which his ears were full, that he got up, walked to the window and leaned out. It was a pastoral that met his eyes. A man piping, followed by little pattering goats; the primitive, un-looked-for picture caught his tired attention, and, just then, opposite the Quais, two women passed—flower sellers, their baskets bright with crocuses and girofles. The bright picture touched him and something of the spring-like beauty that the day wore and that dwelt in the May light, soothed him as nothing had for many hours. He paid his bill, took courage, picked up his hat and gloves and stick and walked out briskly, crossing the bridge to the Rue de Rivoli, determined that night should not fall until he found the woman he sought. Nor did it, though the afternoon wore on and Dan, pursuing his old trails, wan-

dered from worldly meeting place to worldly meeting place. Finally, toward six o’clock, he saw the lengthening shadows steal into the woods of the Bois de Boulogne, and in one of the smaller alleys, where the greentrunked trees of the forests were full of purple shadows and yellow sun discs, flickering down, he picked up a small iron chair and sat himself down, with a long sigh, to rest ■ e While he sat there watching the end of the allee as it gave out into the broader road, a beautiful red motor rolled up to the conjunction of the two ways and Letty Lane, in a summer frock, got out alone. She had a flowing white veil around her head and a flowing white scarf around her shoulders. As the day on the Thames, she was all in white—like a dove. But this time her costume was made vivid and picturesque by the coral* parasol she carried, a pair of coral-colored kid shoes, around her neck and falling on their long chain, she wore his coral beads. He saw that he observed her face before she did him. All this Dan saw before he dashed into the road, came up to her with something like a cry on his lips, bareheaded, for ’his hat and his stick and his gloves were by his chair in the woods. Letty Lane’s hands went to her heart and her face took on a deadly pallor. She did not seem glad to see h|m. Out of his passionate descriptibn of the hours that he had been through, of how he had looked for her, of what he thought and wanted and felt, the actress made what she could, listening to him as they both stood there under the shadows of the green trees. Scanning her face for some sign that she loved him, for It was all he for, Dan saw no such indication there. He finished with: ’r “Yoe know what Ruggles told you was a lie. Of course, I’ve got money enough to give you everything you

want. He’s a lunatic and ought to be shut up.” "It may have been a lie, all right.” she said with forced indifference; "I’ve had time to think it over. You are too young. You don’t know what you want.” She stopped his protestations: “Well, then, I am too old and I don’t want to be tied down,” When he pressed her to tell him. whether or not she had ceased to care for him, she shook her head slowly, marking on the ground fine tracery with the end of her coral parasol. He had been obliged to take her back Jo the red motor, but before they were in earshot of her servants, he said: “Now, you know just what you have done to me, you and Ruggles between you. For my father’s sake and the thing I believed in I’ve kept pretty straight as things go.” He nodded at her with boyish egotism, throwing all the blame on her. "I want you to understand that from no??, right now. I’m going to the dogs just as fast as I can get there, and it won’t be a very gratifying result to anybody that ever cared.” She saw the determination on his fine young face, worn by his sleepless nights, already matured and changed, and she believed him. “Paris,” he nodded toward the gate of the woods which opened upon Paris, “is the place to begin In—right here.. A man,” he went on, and his lips trembled, “can only feel like this once in his life. You know all the talk; there is about young love and fjrst love. Well, that’s what I’ve got for you, and I’m going to turn it now —right now—into what older people warn men from, and do their best to prevent I have seen enough of Paris,” he went on, “these days I have been looking for you, to know where to go and what to do, and I am setting off for it now.” She touched his arm. "No,” she murmured. “No, boy, you are not going to do any such thing!” This much from her was enough for him. He caught her hand and cried: “Then you marry me. What do we care for anybody else in the world?”

“Go back and get your hat and stick and gloves,” she commanded, keeping down the tears. “No, no, you come with me, Letty; I’m not going to let you run to your motor and escape me again,” “Go; I’ll wait here,” she promised. “I give you my word.” As he snatched up the inanimate objects from the leaf-strewn ground where he had thrown them in despair, he thought how things can change in a quarter of an hour. Jubilant to have overcome the fate which had' tried to keep her hidden from him in Paris, he could hardly believe his eyes that she was before them-again, and, as the motor rolled into the Avenue des Acacias, he asked her the question uppermost in his mind: “Are you alone in Paris, Letty?" "Don’t you count?” “No—no—honestly, you know what “You haven’t any right to ask me that” “I have —I have. You gave me a right You’re engaged to me, aren’t you? Gosh, you haven’t forgotten, have you.” “Don’t make me conspicuous in the Bois, Dan,” she said; “I only let you come with me because you were so terribly desperate, so ridiculous.” (TO BE CONTINUED.)

“Why,” Said Ruggles Quietly, “I Told Her You Were Poor, and She Turned You Down.”