Birdie lifted her eyebrows and sighed.

"You funny kid!" she said, "you got a heap to learn."

During the early part of the afternoon the girls shortened one of Birdie's dresses and tacked in its folds to fit Nance's slender figure.

Birdie worked in fits and starts; she listened every time anything stopped in the street below, and made many trips to the window. By and by her easy good humor gave place to irritability. At five o'clock she put on her hat, announcing that she had to go over to the drug store to do some telephoning.

"Lock the door," she counseled, "and if anybody knocks while I'm gone, don't answer."

Nance, left alone, sewed on for a while in a flutter of happy thoughts; then she got up and turned her chair so she would not have to crane her neck to see the photograph on the dresser.

"The making of an awful pretty girl!" she whispered; then she got up and went over to the mirror. Pulling out the hairpins that held the elaborate puffs in place, she let her shining ma.s.s of hair about her shoulders and studied her face intently. Her mouth, she decided, was too big, her eyes too far apart, her neck too thin. Then she made a face at herself and laughed:

"Who cares?" she said.

By and by it got too dark to sew; the match box refused to be found, and she decided it was time to stop anyhow. She opened the window and, gaily humming the music of the Little Bear dance, leaned across the sill, while the cool evening air fanned her hot cheeks.

Far away in the west, over the housetops, she could see the stately spire of the cathedral, a brown silhouette against a pale, lemon sky. Down below, through the dull, yellow dusk, faint lights were already defining the crisscross of streets. The whispers of the waking city came up to her, eager, expectant, like the subdued murmur of a vast audience just before the curtain ascends. Then suddenly, written on the twilight in letters of fire, came the familiar words, "You get what you pay for."

Nance's fingers ceased to drum on the window-sill. It was the big sign facing Post-Office Square, old Post-Office Square, with its litter of papers, its battered weather kiosk, and the old green bench where she and Dan had sat so many evenings on their way home from the factory. Dan! A wave of remorse swept over her. She had forgotten him as completely as if he had never existed. And now that she remembered what was she to do? Go to him and make a clean breast of it? And run the risk of having him invoke the aid of Mrs. Purdy and possibly of Miss Stanley? Not that she was afraid of their stopping her. She repeated to herself the words of defiance with which she would meet their objections and the scorn which she would fling at their "nice girl jobs." No; it was Dan himself she was afraid of. Her imagination quailed before his strong, silent face, and his deep, hurt eyes. She had always taken Dan's part in everything, and something told her she would take it now, even against herself.

The only safe course was to keep away from him, until the great step was taken, and then write him a nice long letter. The nicest she had ever written to anybody. Dear old Dan--dear, dear old Dan.

A long, low whistle from the sidewalk opposite made her start, and look down. At first no one was visible; then a match was struck, flared yellow for a second, and went out, and again that low, significant whistle.

Nance dropped on her knees beside the window and watched. A man's figure emerged from the gloom and crossed the street. A moment later she heard the ringing of the doorbell. Could Dan have heard of her escapade and come after her? But n.o.body knew where she was; the note to Mrs. Snawdor still lay on the corner of the dresser.

She heard a step on the stairs, then three light taps on the door. She scrambled to her feet before she remembered Birdie's caution, then stood motionless, listening.

Again the taps and, "I say, Bird!" came in a vibrant whisper from without.

It seemed to Nance that whoever it was must surely hear the noisy beating of her heart. Then she heard the steps move away and she sighed with relief.

Birdie, coming in later, dismissed the matter with gay denial.

"One of your pipe-dreams, Nance! It must have been one of the other boarders, or the wash woman. Stop your mooning over there by the window and get yourself dressed; we got just thirty-five minutes to get down to the theater."

Nance shook off her misgivings and rushed headlong into her adventure. It was no time to dream of Dan and the letter she was going to write him, or to worry about a disturbing whistle in the street, or a mysterious whisper on the other side of the door. Wasn't it enough that she, Nance Molloy, who only yesterday was watching funerals crawl by in Cemetery Street, was about to dance to real music, on a real stage, before a great audience? She had taken her first mad plunge into the seething current of life, and in these first thrilling, absorbing moments she failed to see the danger signals that flashed across the darkness.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE FIRST NIGHT

At a quarter-past eight in the dressing-rooms of the Gaiety, pandemonium reigned. Red birds, fairies, gnomes, will-o'-the-wisps flitted about, begging, borrowing, stealing articles from each other in good-humored confusion. In and out among them darted the little bear, slapping at each pa.s.serby with her furry paws, practising steps on her cushioned toes, and rushing back every now and then to Birdie, who stood before a mirror in red tights, with a towel around her neck, putting the final touches on her make-up.

It was hot and stuffy, and the air reeked with grease paint. There was a perpetual chatter with occasional outbursts of laughter, followed by peremptory commands of "Less noise down there!" In the midst of the hub-bub a call-boy gave the signal for the opening number of the chorus; the chatter and giggling ceased, and the bright costumes settled into a definite line as the girls filed up the stairs.

Nance, left alone, sat on a trunk and waited for her turn in a fever of impatience. She caught the opening strains of the orchestra as it swung into the favorite melody of the day; she could hear the thud of dancing feet overhead. She was like a stoker shut up in the hold of the vessel while a lively skirmish is in progress on deck.

As she sat there the wardrobe woman, a matronly-looking, Irish person, came up and ordered her peremptorily to get off the trunk.

Nance not only complied, but she offered her a.s.sistance in getting it out of the pa.s.sage.

"May ye have some one as civil as ye are to wait on ye when ye are as old as I am!" said the woman. "It's your first night, eh?"

"Yep. Maybe my last for all I know. They 're trying me out."

"Good luck to ye," said the woman. "Well I mind the night I made me first bow."

"You!"

"No less. I'd a waist on me ye could span wid yer two hands. And legs!

well, it ain't fer me to be braggin', but there ain't a girl in the chorus kin stack up alongside what I oncet was! Me an' a lad named Tim Moriarty did a turn called 'The Wearing of the Green,'--'Ryan and Moriarty' was the team. I kin see the names on the bill-board now! We had 'em laughin' an' cryin' at the same time, 'til their tears run into their open mouths!"

"Wisht I could've seen you," said Nance. "I bet it was great."

The wardrobe woman, unused to such a sympathetic listener, would have lingered indefinitely had not a boy handed Nance a box which absorbed all her attention.

"Miss Birdie La Rue," was inscribed on one side of the card that dangled from it on a silver cord, and on the other was scribbled, "Monte and I will wait for you after the show. Bring another girl. M.D.C."

"And I'm the other girl!" Nance told herself rapturously.

There was a flurry in the wings above and the chorus overflowed down the stairs.

"It's a capacity house," gasped Birdie, "but a regular cold-storage plant. We never got but one round. Spagetti is having spasms."

"What's a round?" demanded Nance, but n.o.body had time to enlighten her.

It was not until the end of the second act that her name was called, and she went scampering up the stairs as fast as her clumsy suit would permit. The stage was set for a forest scene, with gnarled trees and hanging vines and a transparent drop that threw a midnight blue haze over the landscape.

"Crawl up on the stump there!" ordered Reeser, attending to half a dozen things at once. "Put you four paws together. Head up! Hold the pose until the gnomes go off. When I blow the whistle, get down and dance. I'll get the will-o'-the-wisps on as quick as I can. Clear the stage everybody!

Ready for the curtain? Let her go!"

Nance, peering excitedly through the little round holes of her mask, saw the big curtain slowly ascend, revealing only a dazzling row of footlights beyond. Then gradually out of the dusk loomed the vast auditorium with its row after row of dim white faces, reaching back and up, up further than she dared lift her head to see. From down below somewhere sounded the weird tinkle of elfin music, and tiptoeing out from every tree and bush came a green-clad gnome, dancing in stealthy silence in the sleeping forest. Quite unconsciously Nance began to keep time. It was such glorious fun playing at being animals and fairies in the woods at night. Without realizing what she was doing, she dropped into what she used to call in the old sweat-shop days, "dancin' settin' down."

A ripple of amus.e.m.e.nt pa.s.sed through the audience, and she looked around to see what the gnomes were up to, but they were going off the stage, and the suppressed t.i.tter continued. A soft whistle sounded in the wings, and with a furiously beating heart, she slid down from her high stump and ambled down to the footlights.

All might have gone well, had not a sudden shaft of white light shot toward her from the balcony opposite, making a white spot around the place she was standing. She got out of it only to find that it followed her, and in the bewilderment of the discovery, she lost her head completely. All her carefully practised steps and poses were utterly forgotten; she could think of nothing but that pursuing light, and her mad desire to get out of it.

Then something the director had said at the rehearsal flashed across the confusion. "She makes her own part," he had said of Flossy Pierson, and Nance, with grim determination, decided to do the same. A fat man in the left hand box had laughed out when she discovered the spotlight. She determined to make him laugh again. Simulating the dismay that at first was genuine, she began to play tag with the shaft of light, dodging it, jumping over it, hiding from it behind the stump, leading it a merry chase from corner to corner. The fat man grew hysterical. The audience laughed at him, and then it began to laugh at Nance. She threw herself into the frolic with the same mad abandonment with which she used to dance to the hand-organ in front of Slap Jack's saloon. She cut as many fantastic capers as a frisky kitten playing in the twilight; she leapt and rolled and romped, and the spectators, quick to feel the contagion of something new and young and joyful, woke up for the first time during the evening, and followed her pranks with round after round of applause.

When at last the music ceased, she scampered into the wings and sank gasping and laughing into a chair.

"They want you back!" cried Reeser, excitedly beckoning to her. "Go on again. Take the call."

"The what?" said Nance, bewildered. But before she could find out, she was thrust forward and, not being able to see where she was going, she tripped and fell sprawling upon the very scene of her recent triumph.

In the confusion of the moment she instinctively s.n.a.t.c.hed off her mask, and as she did so the sea of faces merged suddenly into one. In the orchestra below, gazing at her with dropped jaw over his arrested fiddle-bow, was old Mr. Demry, with such a comical look of paralyzed amazement on his face that Nance burst into laughter.