She rose from her high-backed, gilded chair, trying to do so without haste. Since the performance was ended she had every right to leave the tent, and she would do so, but she mustn’t run. She mustn’t give herself away—
“Hel-lo, Enid! I couldn’t believe my eyes! What in the world are you doing so far from Park Avenue?”
Sally, forcing herself to walk with sedate leisureliness down the little wooden steps of the platform, saw the New Yorker who had been paying her half-mocking, half admiring attention all afternoon, stride swiftly and gracefully across the tent toward the golden-haired woman. So he too had witnessed Betsy’s hysterical identification! She had forgotten that he was in the tent, watching her, smiling mockingly, biding his chance to ask her again to go to supper with him after the last show that night.
The golden-haired woman halted, and Sally, out of the corner of her veil-protected eyes, saw an expression of startled surprise and then of annoyance sweep over the beautiful little face. Odd that these two who had so strangely crossed her path in one hectic day should know each other, should meet a thousand miles away from home, in the freak show tent of a third-rate carnival!
“Oh, hello, Van! I might ask what you’re doing so far from Park Avenue, but I suppose you’re visiting your cousin, the governor. Court’s here on business and I’m amusing myself taking the orphans to the carnival. A new role for me, isn’t it—Lady Bountiful! Poor little devils! If only they didn’t want to paw me!”
Now that she was safe from being questioned Sally wanted to make her passage to the “alley” door of the tent take as long as possible, so that not a note of the music of that extraordinary voice should be lost to her. She had expected the golden-haired lady’s voice to be a sweet, tinkling soprano, to match her in size, but the voice which thrilled her with its perfection of modulation was a rich, throaty contralto, a little arrogant, even as the speaker was, but so effortless and so golden that Sally would have been content to listen to it, no matter what words it might have said.
Sally paused at the door of the tent, and cast a swift glance backward over her green-satin shoulder. “Van” was holding one of “Enid’s” hands in both of his, laughing down at her, mockingly but fondly, as if they were the best of friends.
“Well,” she said to herself, as she ran toward the dress tent, “now that he’s found her, he won’t bother me. I wonder who ‘Court’ is. Her husband? I hate rich women who play ‘Lady Bountiful,’” she thought with fierce resentment. “But—I can’t hate her. She’s too beautiful. Like a little gold-and-green bird—a singing bird—a bird that sings contralto.”
She was resting between shows, lying on her cot in the dress tent, when Pop Bybee came striding in.
“It’s all right, honey. Don’t be scared to go on with the show. That Pond dame came cackling to me, all het up, half believing what this Betsy baby said about you being Sally Ford, but I give her a grand song and dance about you being the same Princess Lalla who joined the show in New York in April. She wanted to talk to you, but I steered her off, told her you couldn’t hardly speak English and she’d just upset you. Just stick to your lingo, child, and don’t act scared. Ain’t a chance in the world the Pond dame will make another squawk.”