“I say,” pleaded the voice, “won’t you smile at me again?”
Sallie turned then. Descending from a big yellow car which, had she known more of auto aristocracy, would have stamped itself as of prohibitive peerage, was the man of the aisle seat.
“Wait, please,” he begged and his teeth gleamed as they had in the theater. They were nice teeth in a boyish mouth, and upon Sallie they had a disarming effect. In spite of an instinctive impulse to run, she hesitated. The talon scratches inflicted in the chorus dressing-room were still bleeding and the smile of the man who had ceased to be a shadow was balm.
Sallie shifted uncertainly from one foot to the other.
He gave her a curious, somewhat puzzled look. “Round the park—once?”
“I—I don’t live very far. I always walk it.”
“Well, ride it to-night. Please!” Again that disarming gleam.
Sallie looked up with eyes clouded and a tremor on her lips. “It’s nice of you to want to take me, but—”
“But I’ve been coming here every night this week trying to make a hit with you, and until to-night you never even knew I was alive. Don’t you think you ought to be a little kind to a fellow who’s as devoted as that?”
She looked down, tracing a pattern with the toe of her boot.
“Please—I—thanks just the same,” she brought out finally.
She took a step toward the curb, away from him.
And just then came one of those feathery gusts that send whirling the wheel of fate. Miss Mariette Mallard and Grace issued from the stage door, their exchange of glances telling too plainly that they were still enjoying the laugh at her expense. At the curb waited a limousine quite overshadowed by the gorgeousness of the big yellow touring car. They drew near, still giggling.
Swift as a bird, Sallie veered back to him. Instantly he was at her side.
“You can take me home”—it was breathless—“I’ll let you do that.”
Eagerly he helped her in, took his place at the wheel. Sallie turned with the air of royalty. With the sweetest of smiles, her head inclined in the direction of the two girls. As the car sped round the corner she saw them halt abruptly and, like Lot’s wife, stand rooted where they stopped.
To a woman, the discovery that events do not work out as she had planned comes in the nature of a disappointment. To a man, the same discovery adds zest to the determination to make them do so. The man in the yellow touring car was amazed to find that Sallie actually did permit him to drive her home and no farther. He had anticipated that run round the park at least once—probably twice—possibly three times. He had even anticipated a cozy supper at which, across a table not too wide, he could drink deep of a pair of well-like blue eyes shaded with gold. But Sallie gave him her address, ten blocks from the theater, and though he urged with all the masculine dominance of which he was capable, she got out of the car in front of a brownstone house sagging as if with the weight of its own years.