Aunt Azraella's victoria brought up Hester, her cousin and Basil; Bruce and Bartlemy arrived on foot, and all the performers, except little Polly Flinders, went up to the Silsbys for their final dress rehearsal that night. They came back to the little grey house so excited by its result that there was no checking the flood of chatter till past one o'clock.
"This was Eleventh Night," as Prue suggested, and Twelfth Night, the night, followed as quickly as it could, coming into weather that fully justified Aunt Azraella's almanac-maker. Crisp, cold, clear, January sunshine—there could not be better weather for a revel.
The day sped in a whirl of excitement, a delightful day to all but Lydia's orderly soul. She could hardly be expected to approve it, since it included no meal at a normal time, and this disturbance was, besides, the prelude to a dance, which Lydia regarded with horror.
After a supper at half past five which none of the gavotteers, as Rob called them, wanted in the least, Aunt Azraella's carriage came to take them up to Mrs. Silsby's.
Frances flew out to meet them, and the flushed faces of the other three girl performers beamed on them as they descended.
Mrs. Grey superintended the dressing-room with four maids to assist her. It was a trying office, with eight girls chattering like magpies, and eighty things to be done at once, admitting of no delay. The concert that was to precede the gavotte was to be costumed fantastically, and when the girls were ready one could hardly have said whether the picture they presented, huddled, laughing together, was prettier or funnier.
Wythie was a dear little Puritan maiden, in her grey dress and folded kerchief; Rob a brilliant fantasy in her ante-bellum gown with its hoops and sloping shoulders, and her lovely, rebellious hair ringletted from a tremendous back comb. Prue would not consent to being fantastic, so she looked beautiful in a pale green muslin of the empire style, with her golden hair filetted with gold and a great feather fan waving from her long-gloved hand. But the cream of them all was solemn little Polly.
The child was not pretty, but something gathered through her few sad years in the lonely home whence all the other children had departed, her frail health and active imagination, had written itself on her sensitive, pale little face. Now her dilated eyes shone like stars; grey eyes they were, under black lashes, the sort that have a trick of looking black, but whose colour is hard to determine.
They had dressed her in a long gown, belonging to some Puritan child in the days when costumes not merely denied, but annihilated childhood. Polly's gown had a stiff long stomacher, its front was cut square, like a court lady's, and the heavy silk stood out around her figure, disdaining a hint of a droop. A round cap surmounted the pale brown hair which had been brushed smoothly back from the blue-veined brow, and yellow lace fell around the childish throat and tiny thin hands. There was something in the child herself, poor as her home had been, that exactly suited her quaint fineness of habiliment, and she stood, a quick breathing little poem, a picture of perfect harmony and of a quality that made every artist-eye that rested upon her flash with the perception of its values.