“What did you do with all the colored lanterns?” Tommy asked.
“Oh, did you see them? They’re going to be hung out in the grove after the show. There’s cake and ice cream and we’re going to bring the chairs out and sit and talk with the Bramble Bush Man.”
Muffs felt too excited even to guess what he looked like. “The Bramble Bush Man! The Bramble Bush Man!” her thoughts kept saying. “He’s real! He’s true! I’m going to see him!”
“You’re going to be so surprised,” Mary went on. “I was. I couldn’t believe it at first and then I began to get used to it and he isn’t at all the way we thought he was and he’s studied so hard and tried out every one of his tricks before that big mirror so that he’s sure how it will look to us down here in the theatre. Honest, now, doesn’t the grange hall look something like a theatre?”
Tommy said it did although he hadn’t the ghost of an idea what Mary was talking about. She seemed to have found out a lot all that time she wouldn’t play.
“It seems as though Muffs would have guessed it. She must have remembered a little of what he looked like,” and Mary kept talking things like that until they had walked the whole length of the hall and were standing beside the first row of chairs. A printed sign said RESERVED but Mary turned it over and sat down, pushing Muffs and Tommy into the two empty seats beside her.
“Mom’s out there in back with Ellen so she can go home early if she cries. Daddy and Donald and Great Aunt Charlotte are helping and we’re supposed to help too,” Mary whispered.
“But how can we help?”
“By sitting right up near the front so that I can go up quickly when he calls on me.”
“When who calls on you?” asked Tommy, much mystified.