The captain laughed.
"Nothing like taking time by the forelock, my dear fellow. I will never be able to thank you sufficiently for bringing me here to-night!"
"You don't say so!" exclaimed Val, opening his eyes, "you never mean to say you're in love already, do you?"
"It's something very like it, then. Where are you going?"
"Behind the scenes. The next is 'Jack and the Beanstalk,' and they want me for the beanstalk," said Val, complacently, as his long legs strode over the carpet on his way to the back parlor.
There were ever so many tableaux after that—Captain Cavendish, impatient and fidgety, wondered if they would ever end. Perhaps you don't believe in love at first sight, dear reader mine; perhaps I don't myself; but Captain Cavendish, of Her Most Gracious Majesty's —th Regiment of Artillery did, and had fallen in love at first sight at least a dozen times within quarter that number of years.
Captain Cavendish had to exercise the virtue of patience for another half-hour, and then the end came.
In flocked the performers, in laughing commotion, to find themselves surrounded by the rest, and showered with congratulations. Captain Cavendish stood apart, leaning against a fauteuil, stroking his mustache thoughtfully, and looking on. Looking on one face and form only of all the dozens before him; a form tall, taller than the average height, slender, graceful, and girlish as became its owner's eighteen years; and a face inexpressibly lovely in the garish gaslight. There was nobility as well as beauty in that classic profile, that broad brow; fire in those laughing blue eyes, so dark that you nearly mistook them for black; resolution in those molded lips, the sweetest that ever were kissed. The hair alone of Nathalie Marsh would have made a plain face pretty; it hung loose over her shoulders as it had done on the stage, reaching to her waist, a cloud of spun gold, half waves, half curls, half yellow ripples.
Few could have worn this hair like that, but it was eminently becoming to Nathalie, whom everything became. Her dress was of rose color, of a tint just deeper than the rose color in her cheeks, thin and flouting, and she was entirely without ornament. A half-blown rose was fastened in the snowy lace of her corsage, a rose that had decked the buttonhole of Captain Cavendish half an hour before.
Val espied him at last and came over. "Are you making a tableau of yourself," he asked, "for a certain pair of bright eyes to admire? I saw them wandering curiously this way two or three times since we came in."