Five minutes later when the photographers came to take one more picture of the “Queen” on the mountainside, she stood calm and smiling as a June bride.
“To think,” she said to Tom Tobin when this ordeal was over, “to-morrow this beautiful mountain will be a thing of the past! Not one stick, nor stone, nor even a handful of earth will remain. To-morrow a new picture is to begin, a desert scene, new director, new cast, new setting, a brand new movie world.”
“Sort of life-like,” Tom philosophized. “We move a little slower, stay a little longer on this good, green earth, that’s all.”
“Ah, yes, but to-night let us forget.” Jeanne gripped his arm impulsively. “This, my friend, is our big moment, yours and mine. Let us dream for a moment, hope for an hour. Let us dare hope.
“And—” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And if it is not too much, let us pray a little.”
CHAPTER XXIV
THE BATTLE IN THE ORANGE GROVE
It was Florence who next saw the mysterious Chinaman, and that not an hour from the time he disappeared from Jeanne’s delectable mountain. Her day’s work at an end, she had retired to the orange grove on the banks of the lagoon for a short period of rest. She had been here often of late. There was something very unusual and charming about this orange grove thriving here in the very front yard of Chicago.
The place was in reality a tropical garden. As she lay there, propped up on an elbow, the fragrance of tropical flowers, the pungent odor of ripe tropical fruit suggested that she might be thousands of miles from her native city, at the edge of some Central American jungle.
And yet, as she opened her eyes to look away across the lagoon, her eyes told her that she was in truth at the very heart of a fantastical world of play.
“How like a theatre it is!” she exclaimed.