“Here’s hoping.” She hurried away into the night.
There was little need to hope. They would indeed be together again and that under the most unusual circumstances.
CHAPTER XIII
DANCES AND DREAMS
“Jeanne, what can you be doing?”
Florence stared at her eccentric little friend in surprise.
“But can you not see?” Jeanne did not pause for an instant. “I am doing a gypsy dance, practicing for my so very wonderful moving picture. We begin rehearsals to-morrow, and must I not be prepared?”
“Yes, but—”
Florence could say no more. The whole affair was too fantastic for words. Here was Jeanne in the sumptuous apartment of Lorena LeMar. She was clothed in a filmy thing of nile-green that floated around her as clouds float about a mountain peak. She was as radiant, too, as any mountain peak at dawn. She was doing one of her gypsy dances, one of those exotic, fairy-like dances that, now dreamy, now wild as a bird in flight, drug one’s very senses.
“But Jeanne!” she exclaimed, when at last the little French girl threw herself upon a low couch. “Your moving picture is to be one of those simple, human affairs, a story of the Cumberlands. You are to be Zola, an innocent little mountain child.”
“Ah, yes!” Jeanne sat up. Vibrant, alive to the very tips of her toes, she shook her finger at Florence. “There is the trouble! No contrast, none at all. And what is a movie, what can any dramatic thing be, without contrast?