CHAPTER XXI--RUGGLES RETURNS

Dan did not fall asleep until morning, and then he dreamed of Blairtown and the church and a summer evening and something like the drone of the flies on the window-pane soothed him, and came into his waking thoughts, for at noon he was violently shaken by the shoulder and a man's voice called him as he opened his eyes and looked into Ruggles' face.

"Gee Whittaker!" Ruggles exclaimed. "You _are_ one of the seven sleepers! I've been here something like seventeen minutes, whistling and making all kinds of barnyard noises."

As Dan welcomed him, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Ruggles told him that he had come over "the pond" just for the wedding.

"There isn't going to be any wedding, Josh! Got out of all that last night."

Ruggles had the breakfast card in his hand, which the waiter had brought in, and Dan, taking it from his friend, ordered a big breakfast.

"I'm as hungry as the dickens, Rug, and I guess you are, too."

"What was the matter with the duchess?" Ruggles asked. "Were you too young for her, or not rich enough?"

Significantly the boy answered: "One too many, Josh," and Ruggles winced at the response.

"Here are the fellows with my trunks and things," he announced as the porters came in with his luggage. "Just drop them there, boys; they're going to fix some kind of a room later."

Blair's long silk-lined coat lay on a chair where he had flung it, his hat beside it, and Ruggles went over to the corner and lifted up a fragrant glove. It was one of Letty Lane's gloves which Dan had found in the motor and taken possession of. The young man had gone to his dressing-room and begun running his bath, and Ruggles, laying the glove on the table, said to himself:

"I knew he would get rid of the duchess, all right."

But when Dan came back into the room later in his dressing-gown for breakfast, Ruggles said:

"You'll have to send her back her glove, Dannie."

At the sight of it beside the breakfast tray, Dan blushed scarlet. He picked up the fragrant object.

"That's all right; I'll take care of it."

"Is _Mandalay_ running the same as ever?" Ruggles asked over his bacon and eggs.

"Same as ever."

Ruggles saw he had not returned in vain, and that he was destined to take up his part of the business just as he had laid it out for himself to Lord Galorey. "It's up to me now: I'll have to take care of the actress, and I'm darned if I haven't got a job. If Dan colors up like that at the sight of her glove, I wonder what he does when he holds her hand!"