A Night of Gaiety Read Free

to fish while she was staying in Scotland. She soon picked up the art of casting and was thrilled with the first salmon she caught.
    D avita persuaded her to walk up to the top of the moors and for a short time she forgot that she was an actress from the Gaiety Theatre and became just a young girl enjoying the exercise and, when it grew hot, paddling with Davita in the burns.
    T hey went riding on the sure-footed small ponies that Davita had ridden ever since she was a child, talked to the crofters, and shopped in the village which was over two miles from the Castle.
    I t was only afterwards that Davita realised that while she was enjoying her time with Violet, Katie was spending her time with Harry.
    H er father had been busy because it was the lambing season and he always made a point of assisting the shepherds. Moreover, unfortunately as it turned out, there was a run of salmon, which meant that the fishing was good, and he had spent a good part of each day by the river.
    E ven so, Davita thought that what happened was inevitable and it was only a question of Katie finding the right moment.
    S oon after Violet had returned to London and Harry went with her, Katie disappeared.
    S he left a note for her husband saying that she had an irresistible urge to see her friends, and she had not told him so to his face because she could not face a scene! She promised to write to him later.
    W hen she did write, and the letter arrived just as Sir Iain was determined to go and find her, it was to say that she was sorry but she could not leave the stage.
    S he had the chance of going to America with a part on Broadway, and it was something she could not refuse.
    I t was Hector who revealed that that was where Harry also had gone.
    “ He talked aboot it a great deal, Miss Davita, while I was putting out his clothes. He said it was the chance of a lifetime an’ something he’d no intention o’ missing.”
    I n a way, Davita could understand that it had been the “chance of a lifetime” for Katie as well, but her father behaved at first like a madman, then settled down to drown his sorrows.
    H e died of pneumonia, caught because he had fallen into a ditch on his way back from the village where he had gone to buy more whisky.
    H e had apparently been so drunk that he lay there all night, and in the morning a shepherd found him and helped him home. But the cold he caught turned to pneumonia, and when Davita called the Doctor there was nothing he could do.
    D avita now realised with a shock that she had been left penniless, although it was satisfactory that Hector had been provided for.
    H er father had left him a small croft with a pension, separated from everything else which had been pooled to meet his debts.
    W hen Davita looked at the bills she had been appalled at what her father had managed to spend in London during the time he had spent there after her mother’s death.
    T here were bills for champagne, for flowers, for gowns, hats, furs, sun-shades, all of which she presumed he had given to Katie.
    T here was also an account from a Jeweller’s, and bills for his own clothes which seemed astronomical.
    A gain in her imagination she could understand that her father would have wanted to be smart, dashing, and young, as he had been in the days before he first married.
    T hen he had his own hansom-cab always waiting for him, belonged to the best Clubs, and dined every night, naturally not alone, at Romano’s, Rules, or The Continental.
    B ut now Davita was alone, and it was frightening to think that everything that was familiar, everything that had been her background ever since she was a child, was no longer hers.
    M r. Stirling put into words the question that was in her mind.
    “ What are you going to do, Miss Kilcraig?”
    D avita made a helpless little gesture with her hands, and the elderly man watching her thought how young she was and how very lovely.
    I t struck him that she was like a beautiful, exotic flower, and he had