Out in the center of the stage stood a young man, exclaiming eagerly, as he looked in their direction:
"Ah, here comes the little society belle now!"
"Go on; walk right out on the stage," whispered Mally, giving Jessie a push.
Jessie never knew how she got there.
The glare of the foot-lights blinded her. The words her companion uttered fell upon dazed ears. She tried to speak the words that she had learned so perfectly, but they seemed to die away in her throat; no sound could she utter. A great numbness was clutching at her heart-strings, and she could move neither hand nor foot.
"Aha! our little beauty is stage-frightened," she heard Celey Dunbar whisper from one of the wings of the stage, in a loud, triumphant voice. "I am just glad of it. That's what Manager Morgan gets by bringing in a novice. Ha! ha! ha!"
Those words stung Jessie into action, and quick as a flash the truant lines recurred to her, and to the great chagrin of her rival in the wings, she went on with her part unfalteringly to the very end.
Her beauty, and her fresh, sweet simplicity and naturalness quite took the audience by storm, and the curtain was rung down at length amid the wildest storm of applause that that theater had ever known.
The manager was delighted with Jessie Bain's success. The ladies of the company were furious, and they gathered together in one of the entrances and watched her.
"Stage life is coming to a pretty how-de-do," cried one, furiously, "when women who have been before the foot-lights for ten years—ay, given the best years of their lives to the stage—have to stand aside, for a novice like that!"