Still not showing the least trace of fright or nervousness, when her dance was concluded, Olive stepped forward again to the center of the open-air stage:
“I would I had some flowers o’ the spring that might
Become your time of day; and yours, and yours—”
She looked from one face to the other in the rows of people watching her as though addressing Perdita’s pretty speech to them.
Then Miss Winthrop lost her color and old Madame Van Mater stiffened and her eyes flashed. “Foolish girl, she has forgotten her part and is going to make a spectacle of herself and me!” she whispered in her friend’s ear. “I wish I had never come.”
And apparently Olive had forgotten her lines or else grown suddenly ill, for she continued standing perfectly still and speechless for a period of one, two minutes, though surely it seemed like ten, while waves of color swept over her face, turning it crimson and then leaving it pale. “Oh, I cannot believe it,” she whispered softly to herself, never taking her eyes from a central place in the audience, as though on this exquisite May morning she had suddenly seen a ghost.
What secret message traveled across the heads of the audience to the girl on the stage, no one knows, but Olive must have caught it, for she smiled again and dipping her hand in her basket of wild-flowers appeared to present them to various characters, who in Shakespeare’s play stand grouped around the figure of Perdita as she makes this speech:
“Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,