“That’s it, sir! After all, it’s a sort of camouflage.”
“Exactly! I give you something that looks like fire-eating, and you think it is fire-eating! Exactly.”
Then he performed many other tricks; tricks with cards or with other paraphernalia; tricks with balls, swords, hats, all the usual branches of “magic” and the enthralled audience were so entertained and spellbound, that the time slipped by unheeded.
“Good gracious!” cried Patty suddenly, from her place on the stage, “isn’t it getting late?”
“It’s half-past eleven,” Roger informed her, from the audience.
“Then we must stop this magicking! I’m sorry, for I could watch it all night, but there’s more programme yet!”
“Cut it out!” cried a youthful chap in sailor blue; “give us more hocus-pocus!”
“Not tonight,” laughed Patty, and leaving her place, the whole tableau began to break up and the gorgeously attired Orientals came down among the audience and mingled as one group.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Patty said, pausing to speak to Mr. Peckham; “it’s so kind of you, and I’ve been so interested!”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” asserted the kind and genial man, “glad to do it for Van Reypen’s sake, for Our Boys’ sake, and, most of all, Miss Fairfield, for your sake!”