"Did I—do—all right?" says Fenella, between gasps.
"All right?" Dollfus repeats, excitedly. "Cantcher hear 'em? Listen to the noise! Wotcher think they mean? Come—surely to gootness, you're ready now?"
She is calmer, and draws herself out of the baronet's arms.
"Go on, kid," he says, as he lets her go. "Go on, and taste popularity. Take a good long drink of it, Flash."
As she came through the wings the dropping fire of applause exploded into a roar again. It was nearly three minutes—I mean three real minutes—before she was done kissing her hands to us all, and the play was allowed to proceed to its triumphant finale. I happen to know, because I was in front, and a good deal of what you have been reading is my own impression, on record in the columns of the Panoply, of the night Fenella Barbour came into her kingdom.
XVIII
ICE TO THE MOON
And yet an hour later, when the theatre was empty, the cheering and the speeches done, and the linotypes were pecking various people's impressions of a wonderful night into place, she was crying as though her heart would break. She was sitting in Lumsden's study in a big chintz-covered arm-chair. She had taken off her hat but not her cloak, and her hair fell in some disorder over tear-stained cheeks. The baronet sat on the edge of a table opposite her, his long shapely black legs stretched out before him. He had changed his coat for a silk dressing-jacket and was smoking a cigarette. In spite of his air of being at home, something in his face, harassed and unquiet, checked the inference that he was also at his ease. His thin hair was ruffled and his eyes were a little bloodshot. Quite frequently he reached across to a tray on which a syphon, a cut-glass bottle, and a long thin tumbler kept cheerful company.
"Don't you think you've cried about enough, Flash?" he suggested, presently.
She pressed a handkerchief, already wet through, against her eyes, but made no attempt to check the flow. There was something disquieting in this steady drain upon her emotions. It seemed to tell of a mortal wound to affection or self-respect.