"Then who is it at the back of the box on the prompt side?"
"You silly girls! That's the late mayor of Hackney."
"Then why do they make such a fuss of him?" persisted the girl who had started the rumor. "There was a carriage outside the box-office half an hour before the overture, and people were all round it, staring as if it was the king."
"It's a very sad story," the manager explained. "He's blind, poor fellow, and now, whenever he goes to the theater, they watch him being helped out of his brougham."
During the second act not an eye nor a leg was thrown in the direction of the mysterious stranger, whose identity was a great disappointment to the girls; they had counted on Mr. Richards visiting them in the course of the tour, and here it was coming to an end without a sign of him.
However, they were consoled by being told at the last minute that they were going to play three nights at Oxford before the tour came to a definite conclusion. Everybody agreed that it would be a delightful way to wind up, and when the company assembled at Paddington on a brilliant morning in earliest June, they seemed, in the new clothes they had been able to buy during the last month in London, more like a large picnic-party going up to Maidenhead than a touring company.
Dorothy had decided that the visit to Oxford was an occasion to justify breaking into the £500 she had got out of her mother, which was still practically intact, owing to the economy exerted all these weeks. Her new dresses and new hats, combined with that interview in The Boudoir, gave the rest of the chorus an impression that there was somebody behind Dorothy, and they regarded her with a jealous curiosity that was most encouraging.
IV
The three girls had only just finished dinner at their lodgings in Eden Square when Sylvia proposed a walk round Oxford. Dorothy agreed to go out if she were allowed time to change her things; but Lily declared that she was tired after the journey, and preferred to look at illustrated papers in deshabille. Many undergraduates turned their heads to stare at Dorothy's beauty or Sylvia's eye-glass when the two girls were walking down the High toward St. Mary's College, through the gates of which Sylvia calmly suggested that they should pass in order to explore the gardens.
"But suppose they tell us that girls aren't allowed to go in," Dorothy demanded, in a panic.