"Why, she means herself, of course; her father is dead."
"Oh, I see!" and then, after the fashion of young people, the four began to giggle.
"Hush! the audience will be disturbed." Priscilla was the first to recover herself.
"What audience?" asked Martine, looking around the almost empty hall.
"It's fifteen minutes past eight." Lucian closed his watch with a snap. "There's something happening. I wonder what it is. Two or three of those foreigners have gone behind the curtain."
At half-past eight Angelina had not appeared. Lucian proposed going home. Martine thought she ought to find Angelina to learn if anything serious had happened. Some of the boys in the front seats scuffled angrily. The hall was neither well heated, nor well lit. Every one was uncomfortable.
"I think that we really ought to go home," whispered Priscilla, half-timidly, to Lucian. But just at this moment the curtain was pushed aside, and Angelina appeared in the centre of the stage.
In her pink satin gown with its tawdry trimmings at neck and sleeves, she looked "blacker and skinnier than ever," as Lucian put it. Just behind her walked a man who stumbled over her train, and then with a bow began to speak.
"Ladies and gentlemen, it is most unfortunate that this lady and I may not be able to give our entertainment as advertised."
Hisses from the front soon interrupted the speaker.