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 amusement passed 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 titter 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 snatched 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.