The Magic Curtain / A Mystery Story for Girls

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Magic Curtain, by Roy J. Snell
E-text prepared by Stephen Hutcheson, Rod Crawford, Dave Morgan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
A Mystery Story for Girls
By ROY J. SNELL
The Reilly & Lee Co. Chicago
COPYRIGHT 1932 BY THE REILLY & LEE CO. PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
It was that mystic hour when witches are abroad in the land: one o’clock in the morning. The vast auditorium of the Civic Opera House was a well of darkness and silence.
Had you looked in upon this scene at this eerie hour you would most certainly have said, “There is no one here. This grandest of all auditoriums is deserted.” But you would have been mistaken.
Had you been seated in the box at the left side of this great auditorium, out of that vast silence you might have caught a sound. Faint, indistinct, like the rustle of a single autumn leaf, like a breath of air creeping over a glassy sea at night, it would have arrested your attention and caused you to focus your eyes upon a pair of exceedingly long drapes at the side of the opera hall. These drapes might have concealed some very long windows. In reality they did not.
Had you fixed your attention upon this spot you might, in that faint light that was only a little less than absolute darkness, have seen a vague, indistinct spot of white. This spot, resting as it did at a position above the bottom of the drape where a short person’s head would have come, might have startled you.
And well it might. For this was in truth the face of a living being. This mysterious individual was garbed in a dress suit of solemn black. That is why only his face shone out in the dark.
This person, seemingly a golden haired youth with features of unusual fineness, had called himself Pierre Andrews when, a short time earlier, he had applied for a position as usher in the Opera. Because of his almost startling beauty, his perfect manners and his French accent, he had been hired on the spot and had been given a position in the boxes where, for this “first night” at least, those who possessed the great wealth of the city had been expected to foregather.