Her Forbidden Knight Read Free

Dougherty spoke Driscoll found time to regard her even more closely than he had before, in the light of the new and interesting information he had received concerning her.
    Her figure was slender and of medium height; exactly of the proper mold and strength for her small, birdlike head, that seemed to have fluttered and settled of itself on the white and delicate neck. Her lips, partly open, seemed ever to tremble with a sweet consciousness of the mystery she held within her—the mystery of the eternal feminine.
    Her hands, lying before her on the desk, were very white, and perhaps a little too thin; her hair a fluffy, tangled mass of glorious brown.
    “Altogether,” thought Driscoll, “I was not mistaken. She is absolutely a peach.”
    “Miss Williams,” Dougherty was saying, “allow me to introduce a friend. Mr. Driscoll—Miss Williams.”
    Lila extended a friendly hand.
    “A little while ago,” said Driscoll, “I was presumptuous and foolish. I want to ask you to forgive me. I know there was no excuse for it—and yet there was—”
    He stopped short, perceiving that Lila was not listening to him. She was gazing at Dougherty with what seemed to Driscoll an expression of tender alarm.
    “Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly. “Mr. Dougherty!”
    That gentleman appeared startled.
    “What is it?”
    “Your—your—why, what has happened to your nose?”
    “My nose?” he repeated, puzzled.
    “Yes. What has happened?”
    Dougherty raised his hand and roughly grasped that rather prominent feature of his face; then his hand suddenly fell and he made a grimace of pain. Then he remembered.
    “Oh,” he said, as carelessly as possible, “a mere nothing. I fell. Struck it against a billiard table.”
    Driscoll was doing his best to keep a straight face.
    “Mr. Dougherty,” said Lila, shaking a finger at him solemnly, “tell me the truth. You have been fighting.”
    The ex-prizefighter and Broadway loafer, blushing like a schoolboy, gathered himself together as though about to attack the entire heavyweight division.
    “Well,” he demanded with assumed bravado, “and what if I have been fighting?”
    “You promised me you wouldn’t,” said Lila. “That is, you said you wouldn’t—anyone—who annoyed—about me.”
    “It wasn’t his fault, Miss Williams,” said Driscoll, coming to his friend’s assistance. “The blame is mine. It is for that I want to apologize. I can’t say how sorry I am, and I hope you’ll forgive me, and if there’s any—I mean—”
    Driscoll, too, found himself hopelessly confused by the frank gaze of those brown eyes.
    “Anyway,” he ended lamely, “I’ll renew his promise for him. He’ll never do it again.”
    “No, you won’t do anything of the kind!” exclaimed Dougherty, who, during the period of relief offered by Driscoll, had fully recovered himself—“nobody shall promise anything for me. And, Miss Williams, I am very sorry I ever made that promise to you. I take it back. What has happened today is proof that I would never be able to keep it, anyway.”
    “But you must keep it,” said Lila.
    “I can’t.”
    “Mr. Dougherty!”
    “Well, I’ll try,” Dougherty agreed. “I promise to try. But there are some things I can’t stand for; and we all feel the same way about it. You leave it to us. We know you don’t like us much, and we don’t blame you. But any guy that tries to get into informal communication with your eyes is going to see stars—and that’s no pretty speech, either.”
    Lila opened her mouth to renew her protest, but someone approached to send a telegram, and she contented herself with a disapproving shake of the head.
    Driscoll touched the ex-prizefighter on the arm.
    “Dougherty,” he said, “you’re enough to frighten a chorus girl; and that’s going some. Come on, for Heaven’s sake, and do something to that nose!”
    Dougherty allowed himself to be led away.

CHAPTER II.
The Recruit
    I T WAS THREE OR FOUR DAYS LATER, ABOUT