The Tarara, after that one glance, did not again look at the child, but as she skimmed and bounded about the stage, going through all the peculiarly imbecile motions of the modern ballet dance, as she toyed with her tarletan skirts and sidled diagonally on her poor blunted toes, threw her body backward and waved her arms, then smirked and grimaced at the applause that burst from the house, the child’s gaze grew more and more delighted, until it deepened into a look of burning love.
This gaze, also, the dancer caught as she was leaving the stage, and she not only caught, but returned it. Rhodes began to feel deeply alarmed for his secret, but the reflection, that she could not possibly know that the child was his, partly reassured him.
The Tarara vanished in a storm of applause. She had outdone herself to-night, and the audience sent up a vociferous encore.
“Oh, is she coming back? Is she coming back?” asked Clementina, breathlessly.
Her father, greatly wondering, assured her that the dancer would return.
But as the applause rose, subsided, then swelled again, and no Tarara appeared, he found that he had spoken too quickly. It became evident that the favorite refused to respond to the encore, and now, as four couples in the costumes of Bowery toughs swaggered out on the stage, the house grew quiet and turned its attention to the new performance.
But Clementina would not look at them. Instead, she turned to her father and said, in a voice of emphatic command:
“Take me to see that lady.”
Rhodes was accustomed to obey the mandates of this imperious child, but for once he resisted her.
“I cannot,” he said. “She is in her room. She is tired. People are not allowed to go to her private room.”