Fanny turned. They were at the top of the stairway now, with the wings close at hand. “Tom, tell me! Do you really think I can do it? Will you just keep thinking about me every minute while you’re lying there?” She pressed one hand over her heart with a little gesture of fear which simply finished Tom. “Oh, if it _would_ stop beating so fast----”
Tom slipped his arm about her shoulders. “Don’t be afraid, dear,” was what he began to say. But she was away from him in an instant, and he could only recall with tingling pulses that instant’s touch in which at least two of his fingers had come into fleeting contact with the satiny bare arm. The next minute he had rallied and rushed after her upon the stage, to watch with a jealous pleasure the looks which fell upon her from all sides.
At sight of the “star” Cary Ray came forward. All he said was, “I’m mighty glad you’re here, Miss Fitch. Real actresses never can be depended upon, you know--and you certainly look temperamental enough to give your stage manager some trouble!” But his eyes and his smile said that he was well satisfied with her as a member of his caste, and that as a girl of his acquaintance he was immensely glad he knew her. There was promise in Cary’s look as well. All Fanny had to do now was to play that part as she knew she could play it, and Cary Ray would fall before her. Going out to take a drink, after the play should be over--the thing he would naturally want most to do--would pale into insignificance before the stimulus she could offer him, if she but let him take her home and come in for an hour’s talk and coffee by the fire.
But Tom Lockhart and Cary Ray were not the stakes for which Fanny Fitch meant to play that night. There was a tall figure in the wings of which she was well aware, and though she did not look toward it she was very sure that Robert Black was watching her. How, indeed, could he do anything else? Belgian orphans, ambulance drivers, French officers, Englishwomen, Red Cross nurses--how could they all be anything but a background for the lovely “star?” Does not the eye watch the point of high light in any scene?
And then they were all in their places. Cary rushed about giving last warnings, the orchestra music dropped to a low murmur of mystery, and the curtain rose. Black, with a last word to the waiting children, slipped out of the wings, down the stairs, up through the orchestra door, and into a seat held for him by a group of young men who were now his special friends. It was Cary’s expressed wish that he should see the play from the front, and then come back, with the falling of the curtain, to tell the amateur actor-manager how it had gone.