She wandered over to the cigar-stand at one of their hotels, one afternoon, a week before the arrival in Dubuque, to look at a rack of picture postcards.  One of the chorus-men came over to buy some cigarettes.  She felt him look at her, and she felt herself flush a little.  And then he came a step closer to look at the postcards for himself, and sighed and said he wished he had somebody to send postcards to.  He supposed she sent him one every day.  Whereupon Dolly said she wasn’t going to send him one to-day, anyway.  They strolled across the lobby together and sat down in two of the wide-armed unsatisfactory chairs they have at such places; chairs that kept them so far apart they had to shout at each other.  So, after a few minutes, it being a fine day, he suggested they go out for a walk.  She had on her outdoor wraps and his overcoat lay across a chair.

She had already nodded acquiescence to his proposal, when she saw Rose coming in through the door.

“Wait,” she whispered to him.  “Don’t come out with me.  I’ll wait outside.”  And with that she walked up to Rose and told her she was going out to get some cold cream.

Five per cent., perhaps, of the motive that prompted this maneuver, was what it pretended to be, a fear of Rose’s disapprobation and a wish to avoid it.  The other ninety-five per cent. of it was just instinctive love of intrigue.

The chorus-boy waited, blankly wooden enough to have attracted the suspicion of any eye less preoccupied than Rose’s, until she had got around the curve of the stair.  Then, joining Dolly on the pavement, he demanded to be told what it was all about.

Dolly, making up her little mystery as she went along, and making herself more interesting at every step, told him.  They took a long walk, and by the time they got back to the hotel, they were in love.  But they were separated by the malign influence of Dolly’s friend.  They developed a code of signals for circumventing her watchful eye.  They slipped unsigned notes to each other.

So Dolly, on this blustering morning in Dubuque, fidgeting about the room, thinking up a perfectly unnecessary excuse for going out, to give to Rose, answered a knock at the door very promptly and took the folded bit of paper the bell-boy handed her, without listening to what he said, if indeed he said anything at all to her.

She carried it over to the window, turned her back to Rose, unfolded the bit of paper and read it; read it again, frowned in a puzzled way, and said: 

“I didn’t know there was anybody in the company named Rodney.”

“What’s his last name?” asked Rose.  There was nothing in her tone that challenged Dolly’s attention, though the quality of it would have caught a finer ear.  And even if Dolly had looked up, she’d have seen nothing.  Rose lay there just as she had been lying a moment ago.  It would have needed a better observer than Dolly to see that she had stopped breathing.