On looking up to discover its source, she found herself staring at a very broad double skylight some distance above her head.
“It’s like those one sees on the cabins of ships,” she told herself. “Only higher up.”
Satisfied with her inspection of the place, she dropped into a commodious chair and at once fell into a reverie which had to do with her past and the very near future.
How strange her life seemed to her as she reviewed it here in the dim lights of such unusual surroundings!
Petite Jeanne, as you well know from reading The Gypsy Shawl, was born in France. Her family, one of the country’s best, had been impoverished by the war. The war had left her an orphan. Possessed only of a pet bear, she had looked about for some means of support. A friendly and honorable gypsy, Bihari, had taken her into his family. She had learned to do the gypsy dances with her bear.
These she had performed so divinely that in a contest she had been chosen from many other dancers to represent the wanderers of France in a charity pageant to be given at the Paris Opera.
After many perils, brought upon her by the green-eyed jealousy of other gypsies, she had achieved a singular triumph on that great occasion.
As guests of this pageant, two Americans sat in a box that night. One was a playwright, the other a producer.
As the dance progressed, as Petite Jeanne, seeming fairly to fly through the air, passed from one movement to another in her bewitching dance, one of these men touched the other lightly on the arm to whisper: “She is the one.”
“The very one,” the other had whispered back.