Bent as a bow her lithe figure curved now right, now left, to the lilting cadence. Supple as a silken tube her slender body seemed to drink up the fluid sound. No one could have sworn in that vague light that her feet even so much as touched the ground. She was a wraith! A phantasy! A fluctuant miracle of sound and sense!
Tremulously the singer's voice faltered in his throat to watch his song come gray-ghost-true before his staring eyes. With scant restraint the crowd along the walls pressed forward, half pleasure-mad, to solve the mystery of the apparition. Abruptly the song stopped! The dancer faltered! Lights blazed! A veritable shriek of applause went roaring to the roof-tops!
And little Eve Edgarton in one wild panic-stricken surge of terror went tearing off through a blind alley of palms, dodging a cafe table, jumping an improvised trellis—a hundred pursuing voices yelling: "Where is she? Where is she?"—the telltale tinsel scarf flapping frenziedly behind her, flapping—flapping—till at last, between one high, garnished shelf and another it twined its vampirish chiffon around the delicate fronds of a huge potted fern! There was a jerk,—a blur,—a blow, the sickening crash of fallen pottery—And little Eve Edgarton crumpled up on the floor, no longer "colorless" among the pale, dry, rainbow tints and shrill metallic glints of that most wondrous scene.
Under her crimson mask, when the rescuers finally reached her, she lay as perfectly disguised as even her most bashful mood could have wished.
All around her—kneeling, crowding, meddling, interfering—frightened people queried: "Who is she? Who is she?" Now and again from out of the medley some one offered a half-articulate suggestion. It was the hotel proprietor who moved first. Clumsily but kindly, with a fat hand thrust under her shoulders, he tried to raise her head from the floor. Barton himself, as the most recently returned from the "Dark Valley," moved next. Futilely, with a tiny wisp of linen and lace that he found at the girl's belt, he tried to wipe the blood from her lips.
"Who is she? Who is she?" the conglomerate hum of inquiry rose and fell like a moan.
Beneath the crimson stain on the little lace handkerchief a trace of indelible ink showed faintly. Scowlingly Barton bent to decipher it. "Mother's Little Handkerchief," the marking read. "'Mother's?'" Barton repeated blankly. Then suddenly full comprehension broke upon him, and, horridly startled and shocked with a brand-new realization of the tragedy, he fairly blurted out his astonishing information.
"Why—why, it's the—little Edgarton girl!" he hurled like a bombshell into the surrounding company.
Instantly, with the mystery once removed, a dozen hysterical people seemed startled into normal activity. No one knew exactly what to do, but some ran for water and towels, and some ran for the doctor, and one young woman with astonishing acumen slipped out of her white silk petticoat and bound it, blue ribbons and all, as best she could, around Eve Edgarton's poor little gashed head.