THE WAYFARER
By the time Paula had got back to her dressing-room after the long series of tumultuous curtain calls was over, the rush of her friends to express their congratulations in person had begun. After the Tosca, performance she had been adamant about seeing anybody but to-night with a laugh she said, "I don't care. For a few minutes. If they're people I really know."
So Mary took her station beside the Rhadamanthus at the stockade gate—in a proper opera-house, he would have been the stage door-keeper—to pick out the sheep from the goat-like herd of the merely curious who, but for firm measures, would have stormed the place. Those who came down again, pushed out by the weight of new arrivals, lingered about the gate talking things over with Mary. It amused her to see how radically their attitude had changed. Such people as the Averys, the Cravens and the Byrnes, who in a social way had known Paula well, seemed to regard her now as a personage utterly remote, translated into another world altogether. And when they asked about John Wollaston, as most of them did, there was an undertone almost of commiseration about their inquiries, though on the surface this didn't go beyond an expressed regret that he hadn't been here to witness the triumph.
Mary drove them all away at last, even the lingerers in Paula's dressing-room, left her safely in the hands of her dresser and went out into the automobile park to get her car. Coming up softly across the grass and reaching in to turn on the lights, she was startled to discover that there was a man in it. But before she had time more than to gasp, she recognized him as her father.
"I didn't want to push my way in with the mob," he explained, after apologizing for having frightened her. "The car, when I spotted it, seemed a safe place to wait. And the privacy of it," he added, "will be grateful, too, since I'm not perfectly sure that Paula won't refuse outright to see me."
Mary smiled at this and said she hoped he hadn't missed the performance.
"No," he told her somberly, "I didn't miss—any of it." Then on a different note, "Now we'll see whether those dogs of critics won't change their tune."
"Paula herself changed the tune," Mary observed. Then, "She's longing to see you, of course. And there's no reason why you should wait. No one's with her now except her dresser."
She led the way, without giving him a chance to demur, to the gate to the stockade and turned him over to the gatekeeper.
"Please take Doctor Wollaston up to his wife's dressing-room," she said.
And with a momentary pleasure in having evaded introducing him as Madame
Carresford's husband, she turned away and went back to the car.