“Your troubled expression as you said that gave you away, Herr. But I suppose it is very bold and impudent of me to tease you about these matters.”
The Herr smiled.
“Oh, you just tease me all you vant—I like it. But really, if I vass vorried, I vould tell you—surely I vould. Er—if dat young lady vill just remember vhat I haf told her, she—”
Again the troubled expression flitted over Herr Deichenberg’s countenance, and Dorothy, seeing that he was really worried though he would not admit it, decided not to tease him further.
He soon took his departure, and the girl rushed away to tell Aunt Betty that the Herr was well satisfied with her work, then to talk incessantly for half an hour about the coming event. The concert was by far the largest affair that had ever loomed up on Miss Dorothy’s horizon, and she naturally could not get it off her mind.
The great opera house in which the concert was to be held was packed with people the next evening.
Dorothy, on the stage, peeping through a little hole in the curtain, saw one of the most fashionable audiences old Baltimore had ever turned out—the largest, in fact, Herr Deichenberg had ever drawn to one of his affairs, though the drawing power of the old professor had always been something to talk about.
Entering the stage entrance early in the evening, dressed in an elaborate white evening gown, made expressly for this occasion at one of the great dressmaking establishments, Dorothy had deposited her violin in her dressing-room and sallied forth to view the wonders of Fairyland—for such the stage, with its many illusions and mysteries, seemed to her.
She took great care to keep out of the way of the stage hands, who rushed back and forth, dragging great pieces of scenery over the stage as if they were but bits of pasteboard. Drops were let down, set pieces put in place, until, right before the eyes of the girl, a picture, beautiful indeed, had appeared. Where there had been but an empty stage now stood a scene representing a magnificent garden, with statuary, fountains and beautiful shrubbery all in their proper places. True, a great portion of this was represented by the back drop, but Dorothy knew that from the front the scene would look very real. Great jagged edges of wood wings protruded on to the stage—three on either side—while benches and palms were scattered here and there to properly balance the picture. Then, as if to force into the scene an incongruity of some sort, a grand piano was pushed out of the darkness in the rear of the stage, to a place in the garden, where it stood, seemingly the one blot on the landscape.