Then she stepped aside for me to put my eye to the peep-hole, and for one giddy instant I thought I was going to faint. The shock of the surprise was so great. There sat Esther looking like a dream and the man with her was Doctor John Wynne. So she was the "loveliest girl in Christendom" whom he was working and waiting for, and whom he'd have to go on working and waiting for no telling how long, because he had acted the part of a true knight, helping an unfortunate stranger who had no claim on him whatsoever. When Babe talked about the doctor who was attentive to Esther, I took it for granted he was a Barnstable man. It never occurred to me that he had gone from Yarmouth to see her.
My head was in such a whirl that I was thankful the orchestra struck up just then, and we had to scurry to seats in the wing before the curtain went up. My dance didn't come till near the last, so I had plenty of time to think it all over. My first and greatest feeling after the tremendous surprise was one of gladness for both of them. It seemed too good to be true that my ideal girl and my ideal man should have found each other—should belong to each other. It is exactly what I could have wished for each of them. But a little doubt kept raising its head like a tiny snake in a rose-bower. If she were really engaged to him how could she be writing daily to Richard, those long fat letters, and carrying on with him in that fascinating, flirtatious, little way of hers that keeps him simply out of his head about her?
My mind went round and round in that same circle of questions like a squirrel in a cage, never getting anywhere, till all of a sudden my name was called. It was my time to go on the stage and I had forgotten my steps—forgotten everything. For a second I was as cold as ice. But at the first notes of the fandango my castanets seemed to click of their own accord, and I glided on to the stage feeling as light as a bubble and as live as a flash of fire. I was dancing for those two down there in the third row, next to the middle aisle. I would do my best, and not a doubt should cloud my belief in my beautiful Star.
After the performance they were among the first to come up and congratulate me. This time I could meet his gaze fearlessly, and I saw his eyes were just like the little boy's in the picture. They hadn't changed a bit, but looked out on the world as if they trusted everybody in it and everybody could trust him. When he put Esther's scarf around her shoulders he did it in such a masterful, taking-care-of-her sort of way, and she looked up at him so understandingly that I realized Babe Nolan was right about their caring for each other.
I could hardly go to sleep that night for thinking about them. I felt as if I had stepped into a real live story where I actually knew and loved both hero and heroine, and was personally interested in everything that happened to them. I didn't think of Richard's part in it.
And now—oh how can I tell what followed, or how it began? I scarcely know how the change came about, or how it started—that
"little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening, slowly silence all."
Maybe Barby's suggestion that I was seeing Esther through a prism started me to looking at her more critically. And Babe Nolan's statements dropped with such calm precision every time we met, stuck in my memory like barbed arrows with poison on them. I had been mistaken in one thing, why not in others?
At first I made excuses for everything. When Esther counted the pile of photographs given her by the different boys who have rushed her this summer, and said she would have plenty of scalps to show when she went back home, I thought it was just as Judith had said. It wasn't because she was a born flirt that she made each boy think his picture was the only one she cared for. They all did that way back in her home town. She was brought up to think that was part of the game.