"Madam," replied Grazioso, "I will start at once."
"It is four long days' journey from here," the Fairy of the Woods continued. "If you can accomplish each of these four days' journey without turning out of your road and if, on arriving at the castle, you can answer the three questions that an invisible voice will ask you, you will receive there all that you desire. For there the fountain of immortality will be found."
Then slowly the great stage curtain descended. And this was the end of Polly's part in the performance, though one more ordeal was to follow. And though she welcomed this, Polly also dreaded it more than anything else. Always a curtain call came at the close of this scene, when she and the Fairy of the Water, each holding a hand of Grazioso's, must step forth to the footlights and for an instant face the audience, smiling their thanks for the applause.
But Polly had never been able to summon a smile, for at this moment she had always become self-conscious. The glamour and the excitement of the theater suddenly deserted her and she felt not like a fairy or anything fantastic, but only like Polly O'Neill, a very untrained and frightened girl who was deceiving her family and friends to have this first taste of stage life, and who might suffer almost any kind of consequences: imprisonment in some boarding school, Polly feared, where she might never again be allowed any liberty or an equal imprisonment in Woodford, with no mention of the theater made in her presence as long as she lived. For Polly could not determine to what lengths her mother's anger and disapproval of her conduct might lead her. And she did mean to make her confession and face the results as soon as her two weeks' engagement was over.
Therefore tonight she kept an even tighter clasp on Grazioso's hand than usual, her knees were shaking so absurdly. And all the faces in the audience were swimming before her, as though they had no features but eyes. Then suddenly the girl grew rigid with surprise, uncertainty and fear.
In the second row just under the footlights she had discovered a face that was strangely familiar. And yet could it be possible that this person of all others should be here in New York City and in the theater tonight, instead of in the village of Woodford?
CHAPTER X
THE RECOGNITION
Esther was not waiting in the accustomed place where Polly had previously found her when she came off the stage. On her way to the dressing room she shivered a little, missing the coat that her friend was in the habit of wrapping about her shoulders. The night was extremely cold and the back of a theater is nearly always breezy.