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Updated: May 25, 2025
He would have to think of some scheme by which the girl could get her rights, and the world could be left in ignorance of Rose Doran's fraud. To accomplish this, he must sacrifice himself utterly. He must disappear and be forgotten by his friends a penniless man, without a country. And Billie Brookton would be lost to him.
Whatever the future might bring, it seemed to Max that he had lost youth's bright vision of romance. There was no such girl in the world as the girl he had dreamed. The letter had shown him that the one letter he had ever had from Billie Brookton. After his talk with Doctor Lefebre the change in his life became for Max more intimately real than it had been before.
Max hesitated an instant, then, realizing from the words he had overheard how conspicuous a character Josephine Delatour evidently was, he thought best to tell Sanda something more of his story than he had told her yet. He sketched the version, vindicating his foster-mother, which he had given to Billie Brookton and the Reeveses a version which all the world at home would, he believed, soon hear.
Town Tales was delighted to help her do this, because she was Billie Brookton, a celebrity, and because it was "good copy." Other papers many other papers took up the hue and cry which Town Tales started; and the Doran-Reeveses' life became not as agreeable as it had been.
Now, however, he felt that he must pay his debts with the money that was his own; and settling them would make an immense hole in his small inheritance. There, for instance, were the pearls and the ring he had bought for Billie Brookton. Their cost alone was nine thousand dollars, and even if Billie should offer to give them back, he meant to ask her to keep them for remembrance.
His "business," of which he had made much to Miss DeLisle, consisted solely in walking down the Mustapha hill from the garden of the Hotel St. George to the small white-painted post-office, and there sending off two telegrams. One was to Edwin Reeves: the other was the message for which Billie Brookton had thriftily asked in her special postscript. "Have lost everything," he wrote firmly.
Max had glanced through some of the papers before going to bed, looking with a sad, far-off sort of interest at portraits of people whose names he knew. There had been a page of "America's most beautiful actresses" in one Sunday supplement, and among them, of course, was Billie Brookton. No such page would be complete without her! It was a new photograph that Max had never seen.
They were extraordinarily long and thick, golden brown, and black at the tips. The Omallaha girl who had been to New York thought that Billie Brookton herself had had more to do than heaven in the painting of those curled-up tips. But such a suggestion would have been received with contempt by Max Doran, who at the threshold of twenty-five considered himself a judge of eyelashes.
The aunt sat down, and Billie Brookton began "tangoing" with Max Doran. They were a beautiful couple to watch; but of course people had to keep up the farce of dancing, too. This was not, after all, a theatre. One was supposed to have come for something else than to stare at Billie Brookton without paying for a place.
Perhaps, if in Edwin Reeves's judgment silence would in that event be justified, Max might accept this verdict. There was that one grain of hope for the future if it could be called hope. That person was Billie Brookton. Max had dimly expected opposition from Edwin Reeves, whose advice might be what Rose Doran's had been: to give money, and let everything remain as it had been.
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