A single figure appeared on the stage, one all in white. The figure wore a long, flowing robe. The face was white.
From somewhere strange music began to whisper. It was like wind sighing in the trees, the trees in the graveyard at midnight. And this was midnight.
Next instant Jeanne leaped straight into the air. Someone had struck a gong, an Oriental gong.
Mortified beyond belief, she settled back in her place.
And now the magic curtain, like some wall of fire, burned a fiercer red. From the shadows the dragon thrust out his head once more.
The white-faced figure ceased dancing. The wind in the trees sang on. The figure, appearing to see the dragon, drew back in trembling fright.
He approached the fiery curtain, yet his back was ever toward it. There was yet a space between the two sections of the curtain. The figure, darting toward this gap, was caught in the flames.
"Oh!" Jeanne breathed. "He will die in flames!"
Of a sudden the floor beneath the white figure opened and swallowed him up.
Jeanne looked for the dragon. It was gone. The fiery red of the curtain was turning to an orange glow.
"Come. You have seen." It was Hop Long Lee who spoke. Once again his marble-cold hand touched Jeanne's hand.
Ten minutes later the four figures were once more in the street.
"Midnight in an Oriental garden," Angelo breathed.
"That," breathed Marjory Dean, "is drama, Oriental drama. Give it a human touch and it could be made supreme."
"You--you think it could be made into a thing of beauty?"
"Surely. Most certainly, my child. Nothing could be more unique."
"Come," whispered Jeanne happily. "Come with me. The night is young. The day is for sleep. Come. We will have coffee by my fire. Then we will talk, talk of all this. We will create an opera in a night. Is it not so?"
A weird bit of opera it was that they produced that night. Even the atmosphere in which they worked was fantastic. Candle light, a flickering fire that now and then leaped into sudden conflagration, mellow-toned gongs provided by the little lady of the cameo; such were the elements that added to the fantastic reality of the unreal.
In this one-act drama the giant paper dragon remained. The flaming curtain, the setting for some weird Buddhist ceremony, was to furnish the motif. A flesh and blood person, whose part was to be played by Marjory Dean, replaced the thing of white cloth and paper that had danced a weird dance, and became entangled in the fiery curtain. Oriental mystery, the deep hatred of some types of yellow men for the white race, these entered into the story.