Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/376

 They helped him to one of Mrs. McGahn's horse-hair sofas. Someone chafed his hands. Someone unbuttoned his collar. He heard tense and anxious voices, in the faint distance. "I'm all right," he said. "I was walking. I'm tired. I" His voice faded away above him as he rocked down slowly into darkness.

He came back to consciousness at the chill touch of a wet handkerchief on his forehead and the prickle of ammonia fumes in his nostrils; and he opened his eyes on a splitting headache that seemed to tear his brain. "Thanks," he said, looking up at Miss Morris, who was bending over him. "I'm better, thanks." She put back the wet hair from his forehead and drew the palm of her hand caressingly down his cheek. There were tears in her eyes, but before he could be sure that he had seen them, she had risen, and Mrs. McGahn stood in her place, holding a pocket flask of liquor, from which Pittsey poured a little into a glass.

"Swallow this."

It ran down his throat like fire. He coughed and sputtered, laughing almost hysterically. In a few moments he was sitting up again, trying to smile rather wanly at his collapse. Then they told him what they had come to tell.

Mr. Polk's treasurer had written to Pittsey in Boston asking him to take charge of the "ticket office end" of the new theatre. "We used to work together at the old Academy," Pittsey explained in an aside. And Pittsey's influence with the treasurer had joined Miss Morris's applications to Polk to procure for Don a position in the ticket office at $25 a week. "I saw Kidder