Derry laughed, yet felt that it was after all a serious matter.  His appetite, too, was gone.  He too wanted only an ice!  The Doctor’s order was, however, sufficiently substantial to establish a balance.

“May I dance with her?” Derry asked, as the music brought the couples to their feet.

“I don’t usually let her.  Not in a place like this.  But her eyes are begging—­and I spoil her, Drake.”

Curious glances followed the progress of the young millionaire and his pretty partner.  But Derry saw nothing but Jean.  She was like thistledown in his arms, she was saying tremendously interesting things to him, in her lovely voice.

“I cried all through the scene where Cinderella sits on the door-step.  Yet it really wasn’t so very sad—­was it?”

“I think it was sad.  She was such a little starved thing—­starved for love.”

“Yes.  It must be dreadful to be starved for love.”

He glanced down at her.  “You have never felt it?”

“No, except after my mother died—­I wanted her—­”

“My mother is dead, too.”

The Doctor sat alone at the head of the table and ate his lobster; he ate war bread and a green salad, and drank a pot of black coffee, and was at peace with the world.  Star-dust was all very well for those young things out there.  He laughed as they came back to him.  “Each to his own joys—­the lobster was very good, Drake.”

They hardly heard him.  Jean had a rosy parfait with a strawberry on top.  Derry had another.

They talked of the screen play, and the man who had failed.  If he had really loved her he would not have failed, Jean said.

“I think he loved her,” was Derry’s opinion; “the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak.”

Jean shrugged.  “Well, Fate was kind to him—­to give him another chance.  Oh, Daddy, tell him the story the little French woman told at the meeting of the Medical Association.”

“You should have heard her tell it—­but I’ll do my best.  Her eloquence brought us to our feet.  It was when she was in Paris—­just after the American forces arrived.  She stopped at the curb one morning to buy violets of an ancient dame.  She found the old flower vendor inattentive and, looking for the cause, she saw across the street a young American trooper loitering at a corner.  Suddenly the old woman snatched up a bunch of lilies, ran across the street, thrust them into the hands of the astonished soldier.  ‘Take them, American,’ she said.  ‘Take the lilies of France and plant them in Berlin.’”

“Isn’t that wonderful?” Jean breathed.

“Everything is wonderful to her,” the Doctor told Derry, “she lives on the heights.”

“But the lilies of France, Daddy—!  Can’t you see our men and the lilies of France?”

Derry saw them, indeed,—­a glorious company—!

“Oh, if I were a man,” Jean said, and stopped.  She stole a timid glance at him.  The question that he had dreaded was in her eyes.