"Understand, I'm only holding it," said Phyllis, but she would have been more than human if she had not flushed a little with pleasure at the idea.
They began rehearsals again, and this time the opera went through with scarcely a hitch. The little chorus girls had come to adore Phyllis by this time, the boys were fond of her—there was scarcely one of the cast whom she had not helped over or through or under some one of the little hitches incident to private theatricals—and the whole cast was on its tiptoes to see her through. There was a new feeling in the thing, that Clarence noticed directly.
"By Jove, we ought to have insisted on her doing it from the first," he told Tiddy, his lieutenant, under his breath. "I could have gotten twice as much work out of 'em.'
"Who'd have broken the news to Cousin?" he wanted to know.
Clarence eyed him with the detached interest that was his, and meditated with a certain amusement on the changeableness of college boys. Two weeks before Tiddy would have lowered his voice in reverence at Gail's name. Then he glanced across at Joy, sitting close by Phyllis in her gauzes, with her wonderful bronze-gold hair hanging around her like a mantle, and conceded within himself that it was not so surprising after all.
Sure enough, Gail was unable to bear much weight on her foot by the next day. She insisted on being dressed and driven down to the hurried last rehearsal on the afternoon of the performance. But she could not walk without support.
"You'll have to take it, Phyllis," she conceded. "I shall look as beautiful as I can, and sit in the audience and hate you."
"You ought to," said Phyllis mournfully. "I know if it were I in your place, I couldn't bear to come down and look at you."
"I have to, anyway, on account of Laura," said Gail. Miss Ward had come, and was at that moment getting out of her wraps preparatory to meeting the cast and rehearsing.
As Phyllis left her to go into the dressing-room and introduce the stranger, whom she had met, to the others, she heard Joy cry out in surprise.