"What do you think?" she said, while I was getting the money from the safety pocket under my skirt. "The young man who knocked me down on the ice that day is on the train. I've just exchanged a few words with him. He was not much hurt, although unconscious for a short time. His name is Bell--James C. Bell."
Soon after that Tish brought him to us, and we had a nice talk. He said he had not been badly hurt on the ice, although he got a cut on the forehead from Tish's skate, requiring two stitches.
After a time he and Aggie went out on the platform, only returning when Aggie got a cinder in her eye.
"Just think," she said as he went for water to use in my eye-cup, "he is going to meet the girl he is in love with out at the park. She has been there for four weeks. They are engaged. He is very much in love. He didn't talk of anything else."
She told him she had confided his tender secret to us, and instead of looking conscious he seemed glad to have three people instead of one to talk to about her.
"You see, it's like this," he said: "She is very good looking, and in her town a moving-picture company has its studio. That part's all right. I suppose we have to have movies. But the fool of a director met her at a party, and said she would photograph well and ought to be with them. He offered her a salary, and it went to her head. She's young," he added, "and he said she could be as great a hit as Mary Pickford."
"How sad!" said Aggie. "But of course she refused?"
"Well, no, she liked the idea. It got me worried. Worried her people too. Her father's able to give her a good home, and I'm expecting to take that job off his hands in about a year. But girls are queer. She wanted to try it awfully."
It developed that he had gone to her folks about it, and they'd offered her a vacation with some of her school friends in Glacier Park.
"It's pretty wild out there," he went on, "and we felt that the air, and horseback riding and everything, would make her forget the movies. I hope so. She's there now. But she's had the bug pretty hard. Got so she was always posing, without knowing it."
But he was hopeful that she would be cured, and said she was to meet him at the station.
"She's an awfully nice girl, you understand," he finished. "It's only that this thing got hold of her and needed driving out."