Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/85

 lenged if he had seen him first. The man rose to his feet and struck back.

Jane Shore slipped quietly away.

When the waiters rushed in to stop the disorder the star was sitting on the floor, his nose bleeding and one eye closed, and the stranger was walking composedly to the door, with his cigar in his mouth.

He overtook Jane Shore in the hall. "You've forgotten me, Miss Widgen," he said.

She looked at him with bright intentness. "Oh, of course!" she cried. "I know! You're Tom! From the drug-store!"

He nodded, smiling. She held out her hand, delighted. He was the clerk who had given her pony a drink of soda-water the day that she rode into the drug-store and demanded refreshment for herself and her horse. Evidently he was no longer a clerk, but she did not ask for any explanations.

"Why," she cried, "I didn't know you! Why didn't you speak to me?"

She took his arm and hurried him away from the dining-room where the star, with his nose in a table-napkin, was explaining to a friendly head waiter that it was nothing, a private affair, a gentlemanly misunderstanding.

She was saying girlishly to Tom: "How strange to meet you here, after all these years! What are you doing? Come up and sit on the porch with me."