Advancing to the center of the stage, she stretched her arms wide in mute appeal to the empty seats. But no least whisper of admiration or disapproval came back to her.
A moment she stood thus. Then, as her hands dropped, her breast heaved with one great sob.
But, like the sea, Jeanne was made of many moods. “No! No!” She stamped her small foot. “I will not come back to this! I will not! The way back is closed. Only the door ahead is open. I will go on.
“Grand Opera, this is all now. This is art indeed. Pictures, music, story. This is Grand Opera. Big! Grand! Noble! Some day, somehow I shall stand upon that most wonderful of all stages, and those people, those thousands, the richest, the most learned, the most noble, they shall be my people!”
Having delivered this speech to the deserted hall, she once again became a very little lady in a trim black dress suit, seeking a way to the outer air and the street that led to home.
She had come this way because she feared that the slender, dark-faced stranger who had accosted her earlier in the evening would await her at the door.
“If he sees me he will follow,” she told herself. “And then—”
She finished with a shudder.
In choosing this way she had counted upon one circumstance. Nor had she counted in vain. As she hurried down the dark aisle toward the back of the theatre which was, she knew, closed, she came quite suddenly upon a man with a flashlight and time clock.
“Oh, Tommy Mosk!” she exclaimed in a whisper. “How glad I am that you are still here!”