Mrs. Markin had planned a little theatre party for Rose-Mary and some of her Buffalo friends that afternoon. The play was one especially interesting to young girls—a drama built on lines, showing how one ambitious girl succeeded in the world with nothing but a kind heart and a worthy purpose to start with. It abounded in scenes of rural home life, wholesome and picturesque, and one of the features, most conspicuous in the advertising on the billboards was that of the character Katherine, the heroine, holding a neighborhood meeting in a cornfield, among the laborers during the noon hour. The girl appeared in the posters perched upon a water barrel and from that pulpit in the open she, as the daughter of a blind chair caner, won hearts to happiness with the gospel of brotherly love—the new religion of the poor and the oppressed.
While Rose-Mary and Alma enthused over the prospect of a particularly pleasant afternoon, Dorothy seemed nervous, and it was with some misgivings that she finally agreed to attend the party that was really arranged for her special entertainment. The boys, Ned, Nat and Jack were going, of course, and to make the affair complete Rose-Mary had also invited Grace Barnum.
Grace was a particularly bright girl, the sort that cares more for books than pretty clothes, and who had the temerity to wear her hair parted directly in the middle in the very wildest of pompadour days. Not that Grace lacked beauty, for she was of the classic type that seems to defy nationality to such an extent, that it might be a matter of most uncertain guess to say to what country her ancestors had belonged.
This “neutrality” was a source of constant delight to Grace, for each new friend would undertake to assign her to a different country, and so she felt quite like the “real thing in Cosmopolitan types” as she expressed it. The fact, however, might have been accounted for by the incident of Grace having been born under missionary skies in China. Her mother was an American blond, her father a dark foreigner of French and Spanish ancestry and, with all this there was in the Barnum family a distinct strain, of Puritan stock, from which the name Barnum came. Grace, being distinctly different from other girls, no doubt attracted Tavia to her, and now, when received among Tavia’s friends she was welcomed with marked attention that at once established a bond of friendship between her and the other girls.
The boys, naturally, were not slow to “discover her” so that, altogether, the little matinee party, when it had reached the theatre, was a very merry throng of young people. Mrs. Markin acted as chaperone and, five minutes before the time set for the play to begin Dorothy and her friends sat staring at the green fire-proof curtain from a roomy box. Dorothy was like one in a dream.
All about her the others were eagerly waiting, looking the while at the programmes, but Dorothy sat there with the pink leaflet lying unheeded in her lap.
“How much that picture of Katherine resembles Tavia,” was the thought that disturbed her. “The same hair—the same eyes—what if it should be she?”
The curtain was swaying to and fro as those behind it brushed past in their preparations for the presentation of “Katherine, the Chair Caner’s Daughter.”
Dorothy’s heart beat wildly when she fancied Tavia amid such scenes—Tavia the open-hearted girl, the little Dalton “wild flower” as Dorothy liked to call her. Surely no stage heroine could be more heroic than she had always been in her role of shedding happiness on all who came within her sphere of life.
Suddenly Rose-Mary turned to Nat and remarked: