For tumbling into the tent of the Palace of Wonders came a horde of children, boys and girls, the girls dressed exactly alike in skimpy little white lawn dresses trimmed with five-cent lace, the boys in ugly suits of stiff “jeans.”
Her playmates from the orphanage had come to see “Princess Lalla,” lately Sally Ford, ward of the state and now fugitive from “justice.”
CHAPTER X
Sally’s first impulse, when she saw the children of the orphanage come tumbling into the Palace of Wonders tent, was to flee. She was so conscious of being Sally Ford, whose rightful place was with those staring, shy little girls in white lawn “Sunday” dresses, that she completely forgot for one moment of pure terror that to them she would merely be “Princess Lalla,” favorite crystal-gazer to the Sultan of Turkey before she escaped from his harem.
Cowering low in her high-backed gilded chair, in an effort to make herself as small and inconspicuous as possible—a useless effort really, since she was by far the prettiest and most romantic figure in the tent, dressed as she was in Oriental trappings—she watched the children, whom she knew so well, with a pang of homesickness.
Not that she would want to be back with them! But they were her people, the only chums she had ever known. How well she knew how they felt, liberated for one blessed afternoon from the bleak corridors of the orphanage, catapulted by someone’s generosity into fairyland. For to them the carnival was fairyland. These romance-and-beauty-starved orphans saw only glamor and wonder, believed with all their hearts every extravagant word that Gus, the barker, uttered in his stentorian bawl.
Suddenly love and compassion filled her heart to over-flowing. She wanted to run down the steps that led to her little platform and gather Clara and Thelma and Betsy to her breast. She felt so much older and wiser than she had been two weeks ago, when she had “play-acted” for them as they scrubbed the floor of the dormitory. How awed and admiring they would be if, when their thin little bodies were pressed tight in her arms, she should whisper, “It’s me—Sally—play-acting! It’s me, kids!” But of course she couldn’t do it; she would be betraying not only herself but David, and she would rather die than that David should be caught and punished for defending her against Clem Carson.
As the children milled excitedly in the tent, huddling together in groups like sheep, holding each other’s hands, giggling and whispering together as their awed eyes roamed from one “freak” to another, Sally searched their faces hungrily, jealously.
Thelma had cut a deep gash in her cheek; it would leave a scar. Six-year-old Betsy had a summer cold and no handkerchief; her cheeks were painted poppy-red with fever, or perhaps it was only excitement.
There was a new little girl whom Sally had never seen before, such a homely little runt of a girl, with enormous, hunted eyes and big freckles on her putty-colored cheeks. Her snuff-colored hair had been clipped close to her scalp, so that her poor little round head looked like the jaw of a man who has not shaved for three days.