“You got left behind and were frightened,” he asked and answered in same breath. “I knew it—I told ’em all so. Then some of the ushers took you back and let you out of the stage door. Silly, to get alarmed over a little thing like that. But I couldn’t talk to Mrs. Markin—she was almost in hysterics. We’d better hurry back to relieve her suspense.”
“I should not have delayed talking, but really I was so—so frightened,” ventured Dorothy.
“Cert you were. Well, you just let me tell the story. It will save lots of trouble, but of course the girls will have to know all about the people you met—behind the scenes.”
Was ever there such a blessed boy as Nat? Here he had nicely explained all Dorothy’s troubles and in the simplest manner possible. How splendid boy cousins are, thought Dorothy. They have such a power of sympathy for girls—better than brothers—if girls would only allow them to exercise it—in a cousinly way.
Or did Nat know of Dorothy’s deliberate visit to the little actress who had played Katherine? Perhaps some one had told him his cousin was in the dressing room and he had just waited for her to appear at the stage door. Dorothy was sure Nat would save her from making any troublesome explanations, and when he asked her, in the most matter-of-fact way if she happened to meet the girl with the brown hair who looked so much like Tavia, she had no hesitation in telling him that she was Miss Riceman, and that she was a most charming young lady.
“She doesn’t look a bit like Tavia—close by,” added Dorothy, remembering the scene in the dressing room. “She is as refined and polite as possible. She showed me the way out.”
After telling that much of her adventure to Nat, Dorothy was well prepared to repeat the story to the others, without fear of disclosing the real object of her visit behind the scenes.
When Mrs. Markin was finally assured of Dorothy’s safety, and had actually listened with interest to her recital of the trip into stageland, and her encounters there, the matter was regarded as an incident fraught with untold curious bits of “real live adventure.” Girls do delight in investigating and exploring the unusual quite as much as boys do, although the latter are prone to attribute that faculty to themselves as something patented.
So it happens that when a girl does actually have an experience she and her companions know how to appreciate the novelty. That was how it turned out with Dorothy and her friends. Rose-Mary and Alma couldn’t hear enough of “behind the scenes” and Alma ventured to ask Dorothy to take them in through the stage door to make a second call on Miss Riceman, when she might introduce her friends to a real actress.
But Dorothy tried to appease their curiosity as best she could, telling over and over again how she got lost in the crowd, how the usher accosted her, and led her to the stage, and then how she got confused in her effort to find the “right door” (which was all true enough) and how it was then that Miss Riceman came out and invited Dorothy in. Then she related how she became faint and told of the water being brought, and so on, until the very closing of the stage door after her when she found herself in the alley with Nat at her side.