He looked up anxiously. How he grudged the pleasure that he could not share!
Ned, although startled, surprised, and angry, perceived the net that circumstance was beginning to weave about him. But he would not listen to the counsels of prudence,—for when had he ever taken a dare? Besides, he hardly believed that Pete meant to make good his threat.
"They'll need something more than yer word, ye lyin' hoodlum!" he said, shaking his fist at the shabby old cap below. "Ef the perlice kin find a cobweb o' proof that I stole actor's di'monds I'll go ter jail without wunking a wink."
With this boast he sprang down and disappeared amidst the glooms within.
The clouds were parting before the rising moon. Its golden rays fell upon the empty window. The dragon looked out and grinned. Pete stood in baffled anger and astonishment listening to his friend's stealthy steps till the sound died away in the distance. Then settling his cap more firmly on his head, he ran swiftly down the alley, up the side street, and out upon the broad avenue.
CHAPTER II
Meantime Ned was timorously skulking about in that strange, unkempt, haggard world known as "behind the scenes." He realized that it was to him a foreign world, and he bore himself with the alert suspiciousness of an alien. He kept an anxious lookout for the red jackets of the scene-shifters, and whenever he saw them bespangling the gray shadows of those dreary canvas vistas he dodged dexterously behind other "flats" and into deeper glooms.
"I've got to keep my eye peeled or some o' them fellers will ketch me sure!" he said to himself.
Once down one of these aisles a sudden veritable scene showed at the end of the perspective, through a wide door opening upon a room tinted in green, the color being very keen amidst the dun shadows without and the brilliant artificial illumination within. There, seemingly lounging or waiting, were groups of men and women, richly and quaintly attired, but with a prosaic every-day pose and gesture and expression of countenance, the effect curiously at variance with the suggestions of the antique garb they wore. This incongruity was not perceptible in a figure that he descried suddenly approaching, clad in a gown of soft shimmering white silk as in everlasting youth and beauty,—so radiant, so poetic, so unreal an apparition to the boy that Ned, stopping to stare, lost all sense of his identity. She, who was to be Ophelia, catching a glimpse of his pale, wistful, astonished little face in the glooms, with its big dark eyes and curling red hair, as he stood as if rooted to the spot, cast a half-amused smile on him as she passed. Her maid was following at a distance with a shawl, and Ned, suddenly realizing his peril, hastily darted behind one of the tombstones which even now were placed in readiness, awaiting the graveyard scene, and then once more dodged from flat to flat and from trestle to trestle.