The girls, however, on their return found a bottle of champagne and two glasses waiting for them in Fanny's dressing-room. It had been sent with Mr. Brown's compliments to Miss Bellairs. The sight of it sent up Fanny's spirits with a bound.
"I did not know how I was going to get through the evening," she confessed, "but this will put new life into us."
She insisted upon Joan having a glass, and the latter, conscious that in her present state of tiredness she could hardly stand, far less dance, sipped a little of the clear, bubbling liquid—sipped till the small room grew large, till her feet seemed to tread on air, and her eyes shone and sparkled like the brightest of stars on a dark night.
The theatre after that, the crowded rows of faces, the music and the thunder of applause—the audience were good-tempered and inclined to be amused at anything—passed before her like some gorgeous light-flecked dream. When the soldiers in the back row took up the words of Fanny's song and shouted the refrain she felt swept along on the wings of success.
At the fall of the curtain Daddy Brown patted her on the back. He was by this time radiant with cheerfulness once more.
"You will do, young lady," he said. "We'll have to see if we can't work in a special dance for you;" and Fanny flung her arms round Joan in wild joy. "You're made, honey," she whispered, "if Brown has noticed you, you're made. I always said you could dance."
It was very thrilling and exciting, but the champagne was beginning to lose its effect. The world was growing grey again. Joan's head throbbed, and she felt self-consciously inclined to make a fool of herself. She sat very silent through the supper to which Brown treated the company at his hotel. There were about twenty people present, nearly all men; Joan wondered where they had been collected from, and she did not quite like the look of any of them. Fanny was making a great deal of noise, and how funny and tawdry their faces looked under the bright light. After supper there was a dance, the table was pushed aside, and someone—Joan saw with surprise that it was Daddy Brown—pounded away at a one-step on the piano. Everyone danced, the men, since there were not enough ladies to go [around], with each other.
Fanny, wilder, gayer than ever, skirts held very high, showed off a new cake-walk in the centre of the room. Her companion, a young, weak-looking youth, was evidently far from sober, and the more intricate the step, the more hopelessly did he become entangled with his own feet, amidst shouts of amusement from the onlookers.
Joan turned presently—she had narrowly escaped being dragged into the dance by a noisily cheerful gentleman—to find Strachan standing beside her. He was watching her with some shade of curiosity.
"Why don't you go home?" he suggested; "it isn't amusing you and I can see you are tired. We get used to these kind of shows after a time."