“She had my promise to say nothing until tonight. Yes, I have been in the secret since last winter.” Richard explained. “It was a blessed accident Polly’s finding just this particular kind of play. She could have played no other so well while still so young. You see, she was acting in a cheap stock company when a manager happened quite by chance to discover her. But she will want to tell you the story herself. I must not anticipate.”
For a moment, instead of replying, Margaret Adams looked slightly amazed. “I did not know that you and Polly were such great friends, Richard, that she has preferred confiding in you to any one else,” she said at length.
Richard Hunt had taken his seat and was now watching the unconcealed triumph and delight among the group of Polly’s family and friends in the box across the theater.
“I wasn’t chosen; I was an accident,” the man smiled. “Last winter in Boston I met Polly—Miss O’Neill,” he corrected himself, “and she told me what she was trying to do, fight things out for herself without advice or assistance from any one of us. But, of course, after I was taken into her secret she allowed me to keep in touch with her now and then. The child was lonely and dreadfully afraid you and her other friends would not understand or forgive what she had tried to do.”
“Polly is not exactly a child, Richard; she must be nearly twenty-two,” Margaret Adams replied quietly.
In the final act the little Irish heroine had her hour of triumph. The hero had fallen in love with her instead of with the fashionable cousin. Yet Moira was not the pauper her relatives had believed her, for the old grandfather had recently died and his solicitor appeared with his will. The Irish township had purchased his acres of supposedly worthless land and Moira was proclaimed an heiress.
At the end Polly was her gayest, most inimitable, laughing self. Half a dozen times Betty, Mollie and Sylvia found themselves forgetting that she was acting at all. How many times had they not known her just as wilful and charming, their Polly of a hundred swift, succeeding moods.
Moira was not angry with any one in the world, certainly not with the cousins who had been almost cruel to her. During her stay among them she had learned of their need of money and was now quick to offer all that she had. She was so generous, so happy, and with it all so petulant and charming, that at last even the stern aunt and the envious cousins succumbed to her.
Then the curtain descended on a very differently clad heroine, but one who was essentially unchanged. Moira was dressed in a white satin made in the latest and most exquisite fashion; and her black hair was beautifully arranged on her small, graceful head. Only the people who loved her could have dreamed that Polly O’Neill would ever look so pretty. And in one hand the girl was holding a single red rose, though under the other arm she was still clutching her beloved Maltese cat.
“Polly will not answer any curtain calls tonight,” Mrs. Wharton whispered hurriedly when the last scene was over. “If the others will excuse us she has asked that only Sylvia, Betty and Mollie come to her room. Margaret Adams will be there, but no one else. She is very tired at the close of her performances, but she is afraid you girls may not forgive her long silence and her deception. Will you come this way with me?”