She climbed up the ladder inside the barn and appeared on the edge of the roof. She was laughing, as was her custom when she began her performance before a crowd. She was dressed in a silk frock, with broad white and red stripes, a scarlet silk handkerchief was crossed over her chest.
Raoul was in a state of feverish excitement.
The captain went to him.
"Do you want to help mummy, Dorothy?" he said in a confidential tone.
"Certainly I do."
"Well, go away, monsieur."
Dorothy stretched out her leg. Her foot, which was bare in a cloth sandal divided at the big toe, tried the wire, as a bather's foot tries the coldness of the water. And then she quickly stepped on to it, made several steps, sliding, and stopped.
She saluted right and left, pretending to believe herself in the presence of a large audience, and came sliding forward again with a regular, rhythmic movement of her legs and a swaying of her bust and arms which balanced her like the beating of the wings of a bird. So she arrived above the pool. The wire, slackened, bent under her weight and jerked upwards. A second time she stopped, when she was over the middle of the pool.
This was the hardest part of her undertaking. She was no longer able to hook, so to speak, her gaze on a fixed point among the hillocks, and lend her balance the support of something stable. She had to lower her eyes and try to read, in the moving and glittering water, repelling the fascination of the sun's reflection, the words and the figures. A terribly dangerous task! She had to essay it several times and to rise upright the very moment she found herself bending over the void. A minute or two passed, minutes of veritable anguish. She brought them to an end by a salute with both arms, stretching them out with even gracefulness, and a cry of victory; then she at once walked on again.
Raoul had crossed the bridge which spans the end of the pool and he was already on a kind of platform among the hillocks, at which the wire ended. She was struck by his paleness and touched by his anxiety on her account.