Pretty Geraldine, the New York Salesgirl; or, Wedded to Her Choice

"IF I WERE A KING I WOULD RAISE HER TO MY THRONE!"

"As shines the moon in cloudless skies,
She in her poor attire was seen,
One praised her ankles, one her eyes,
One her dark hair, and lovesome mien,
So sweet a face, such angel grace,
In all that land had never been;
Cophetua swore a royal oath,
'This beggar maid shall be my queen!'"

    Tennyson.
But, leaving our interests in the Garden City temporarily, we must journey across the dark-blue sea, to follow the fortunes of our noble hero, Harry Hawthorne.

As the intelligent reader has doubtless surmised already, he was the hero of the newspaper paragraph Mrs. Fitzgerald had read to her daughter, and he had crossed the seas to claim his own.

Young blood is often too hot, and an angry quarrel with his old father had made the heir of a noble name and fine estate a voluntary exile from home under distant skies, where he was not too proud to earn his bread by honest toil.

But all that was changed now.

In the English county of Devonshire, at the grand old castle home of Raneleigh, the old lord lay dead, and my lord, his son, must lay aside his masquerading and come home to wear the honors and the title that were his by ancestral right.

His two Chicago friends were charmed with his romance when he told it to them, one day on the steamer, just before they landed on the bonny shore of England.

"I only borrowed the name of Jack Daly," he laughed. "The one that belongs to me is Harry Leland, and my title will be Lord Putnam."

They congratulated him warmly. It was a romance in real life, they said, and Ralph Washburn declared he should weave it into a novel.

"But you do not know the most romantic part of it yet," said the young man, with a sigh. He debated the question with himself a moment, then decided it could do no harm to confide in his two noble friends.

So, sadly enough, he told them the story of the love affair that had brought him to Chicago, keeping back nothing.

"So now you know how I came by the wound that made you two my stanch friends for life, and you can understand why I let my enemy alone, rather than bring into publicity the name of a woman I loved," he ended.

"But you left the case in the hands of a detective?" said Leroy Hill.

"Yes, he is to find Clifford Standish and shadow him until it is found out whether he lied to me about Miss Harding. He has full instructions to act in my place during my absence."

"And this beautiful girl that you loved when you were simply Harry Hawthorne, the New York fireman, do you mean that if she is found and proved innocent that you will stoop to her now that you have come into your ancestral honors?" inquired the romantic young author, with interest.

"If I were a king I would raise her to my throne!" replied the ardent lover, proudly.

They applauded his faithful love, but they thought that the prospect of his happiness looked very dismal.

The actor's story seemed so plausible that they feared it might be true that he had won the vacillating heart of pretty Geraldine.

They looked at each other significantly, but they did not have the heart to breathe their doubts aloud. They saw that he was already unhappy enough.

But they felt sure in their hearts that if the detective ever traced the movements of the persons in whom Hawthorne was interested, he would report Standish's story as true.

When they had been in England a week, having witnessed the joy of the mother over the truant's return, and had been the recipients of the most charming hospitalities from the family, a letter came from the Chicago detective to Lord Putnam.

But the information it contained was very meagre.

He had traced Clifford Standish through a very clever disguise, but the whereabouts of Miss Harding remained a mystery.

In fact, the detective was inclined to believe that the actor had lost interest in the girl he had brought to Chicago. Perhaps he had wearied of her, and left her to despair. At any rate, he was conducting a correspondence, perhaps a flirtation with a handsome governess, Miss Erroll, employed by Mrs. Fitzgerald, a wealthy widow, on Prairie avenue.

The pride of Geraldine's mother and her repugnance to the name of her first husband had induced her, on bringing the girl to Chicago, to give out to the newspapers the paragraphs for publication stating that her daughter, Miss Fitzgerald, had been called home from school by the death of her father. Even in the household Geraldine bore the same name, and thus the clever detective was baffled by the simple substitution of another name; and while he had traced Clifford Standish up to his very entrance to the Prairie avenue mansion, he had no suspicion that the actor was interested in any one of the family besides the handsome governess.

But the same mail had brought Lady Putnam also a letter from Chicago, and when she had read it she called her son into her boudoir, where she sat alone, saying, in a flutter of excitement:

"I have a letter from America, dear Leland, and as you are so fond of everything American, perhaps you can remember the beautiful little American girl to whom you were betrothed when she was only about two years old?"

CHAPTER XLVI.

"I WILL TEST MY DARLING'S LOVE."

"I have heard or dreamt, it may be—
What love is when true;
How to test it—how to try it—
It the gift of few.
Only a true heart can find it
True as it is true;
Only eyes as clear and tender
Look it through and through."

The handsome young lord looked at his mother in surprise when she uttered those words: "Perhaps you remember the beautiful little American girl to whom you were betrothed when she was barely two years old?"

That episode of his childish days had almost escaped the young man's memory, so he said, carelessly:

"Indeed, I have almost forgotten it, dear mother."

"Then I must refresh your memory, Leland, for you are old enough now to redeem your pledge."

Lord Putnam looked startled, and said, hastily:

"Of course, you would not consider a trifle like that binding on a grown man."

The stately mother looked somewhat disappointed, and answered, slowly:

"I had hoped it might be, especially as you have no other entanglement."

"Why are you so sure of that, my dear mother?"

She started, and gave him a frightened look.

"Oh, I—I—hope there is none," she said, vaguely.

For a moment it came to him to tell her this love story.