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74
SCREENLAND
"You've guessed it." Peggy chuckled.
"Don't worry about this particular Miss Dixon, old thing. She wasn't born yesterday and, when she was. she grabbed off a fifth sense that warns her when a dog gets ready to bite. I'll come back just as I leave, which is nothing to cable the Hall of Fame about." Then seriously, looking up into Sid's sombre eyes, "But you are a dear to think of warning me and I'll keep both eyes wide open."
"Come back just as you are, that's all I want, Peg," said Sid earnestly.
"It's a bet," promptly. Then, with a little laugh, "Unless I get the chance to become Mrs. Ned Blystone," laughingly. Sid's fingers closed quickly about Peggy's hand. She looked down, then up at his face, turned, now, towards the river. She began to understand what had been on his mind. "You're hurting me, Sidney," she said quietly. "And I refuse to entertain that policeman looking at us."
The trip to the Cape Cod coast was like a fairy dream come true for Peggy. Miss Thomas had motored ahead. For some mysterious reason, she had seen fit to sidetrack Jordan's suggestion that he and Blystone make a three-some with her and stop over at Eastern Point for a swim, and some golf. Therefore, Ned was among the members of the company who went by train and Peggy had a chance to present him to Lois and Sid who had gone to the Grand Central to see her off in style. By dint of every artifice she could employ Peggy was in the same car with the star. The one thing needed to make her day unbelievably perfect was . . . well, whatever it was, it happened, just as things happen mostly in fairy stories.
They were rushing along the Shore Line, just east of New Haven, when Berry, the continuity clerk, came up to Peggy's chair and somewhat grudgingly informed her that Director Jordan wanted to see her in his compartment.
Peggy smiled up at the self-important youngster by her side.
"You tell me when I laugh," she said. "I never was quick with the high comedy stuff. I run to Sennett's." The messenger from Mars frowned.
"Jordan wants you in his compartment, 'at the end of the car." He jerked a thumb in the proper direction. "They are going over the script. I'm not going to drag you there," he added with acrid courtesy, "but ."
Peggy entirely missed the finish of the sentence. During her wabbly dash d own the swaying parlor car she narrowly avoided wrecking a waiter with a tiay, and let a quick smile of apology suffice for a keen-eyed somewhat foreign looking man over whose outstretched legs she failed to step. He looked at her curiously, observed that she entered Jordan's compartment and then turned back to his Wall Street Journal with a satisfied smile.
Jordan, clearly upset by the unusual procedure that his male star had insisted on, looked up from the script on his lap as Peggy entered.
"Sit down," he barked. "Blystone has an idea that the author ought to have consulted you before he wrote this fool picture." As Peggy, amazed and a bit confused even for Peggy, sank down on a seat, he added: "The more I see of this damned continuity the more convinced I am that you couldn't hurt it any. As usual I've got to do over most of it myself."
With a concluding growl he turned back to the script and remained buried in it for the rest of the interview.
"Mr. Jordan exaggerates, Miss Dixon"— Peggy's heart smothered one of those silly jazz movements — "You're
going to double for Miss Thomas in some of the scenes, I believe."
'Unless some one kills me before they're snot," admitted Peggy, and Ned Blystone mentally noted the fact that her eyes were as attractive as they were unusual and that the lines of her throat were excellent.
"I thought I might go over some of the stuff that we are going to do," continued Blystone. "If Mr. Jordan will permit I'll give you a quick outline of the story. It will help, I think. Mind if I smoke?"
"I love it." Blystone cast another approving glance towards the girl by his side. She wasn't a mere ordinary human being, that was evident.
And so Peggy, for the first time in her experience with the movies, got a brief resume of the story she was to appear in. It dealt with Grace Ferguson, daughter of an old lighthouse keeper. She had fallen in love with Harold Livingstone, a young millionaire, whose society exploits and doings in Wall Street she had followed assiduously. It must not be understood that the two had met. Quite to the contrary, Grace's passion had been inspired, nurtured and fanned to a flame mostly by the Sunday supplements that visitors left when they visited the lighthouse. Visitors in stories have a way of doing such things so that complications and motivations and complex and a lot of other vital things can leap into existence.
Just at the moment when Grace in her day-dream is about to marry her hero, then comes the startling news. It is in a week-old society column. Harold is to marry no less than Gwendolyn Morganbilt, heiress, beauty, polo expert, etc. Peggy afterwards admitted to Lois that the author made a composition out of Gwen rather than a substantial human being. At all events Grace sat, by day, on the shore, and, by night, in the white house near the light, wishing that she might make some great sacrifice for her supplement hero and thus win his regard. ■ Days of longing pass. Then, from The Herald, but a day old, comes the fearful news that Harold, on his yacht, the "Fleetwing," is sailing from New York with Gwen and a lot of other metropolites who furnish good copy. That night the old keeper burnishes his lights as never before. The sea is a raging thing, licking its chops, so to speak, for the dainty morsel that is to come ere long. A ship in distress is sighted. The old lighthouse keeper is too old to do anything. The members of the Coast Guard are not on their jobs. It is up to Grace.
"This is where you come in," interrupted Blystone. "You push off a small boat, make for the rock and save Harold. That's the part of the story I want to talk over with you, if you don't mind."
Blystone failed to give the finish of the film. Perhaps it was some finer instinct that warned him not to dispel the illusion that showed so clearly in the eyes of the girl by his side. What actually happened was that the crew, Gwen and the rest of the guests, saved themselves, as Harold would have done if left to his own resources. The finish came when Harold, drenched from his trip in the small boat, turned to the half-exhausted Grace and said, "Thank you, my good woman. If you, or your representative, will call at my New York office, you will be suitably rewarded. And if you don't mind, I'll go now and get a drink. I'm hanged near frozen." Whereat, Grace, hiding her sorrow, countered with, "It is nothing, good sir; I would do as much for a dog." And so her young romance was brutally busted on "The Shoals of Illusion," and she married Joe Sistare, the coast guard man, eventually becoming the mother of twins, which certainly seemed like shifting her revenge to a perfectly innocent person.