'Cynthia, I will brave all for your sake.
I will follow you to the ends of the earth.'
At this point a crash is heard without.
I," said Patty, proudly, "am the crash. I sit behind a moonlit balcony in a space about two feet square, and drop a lamp-chimney into a box.
It may not sound like a very important part, but it is the pivot upon which the whole plot turns."
"I hope you won't be taken with stage-fright," laughed Cathy.
"I'll try not," said Patty. "There comes the butler and Lord Bromley and Cynthia.
I've got to go and make them up."
"Why are you making people up, if you are not on the committee?"
"Oh, once, during a period of mental weakness, I took china-painting lessons, and I'm supposed to know how.
Good-by."
"Good-by.
If you get any flowers I'll send them in by an usher."
"Do," said Patty. "I'm sure to get a lot."
Behind the scenes all was joyful confusion.
Georgie, in a short skirt, with her shirt-waist sleeves rolled up and a note-book in her hand, was standing in the middle of the stage directing the scene-shifters and distracted committee.
Patty, in the "green-room," was presiding over the cast, with a hare's foot in one hand and the other daubed with red and blue grease-paints.
"Oh, Patty," remonstrated Cynthia, with a horrified glance in the mirror, "I look more like a soubrette than a heroine."
"That's the way you ought to look," returned Patty. "Here, hold still till I put another dab on your chin."
Cynthia appealed to the faithful Lord Bromley, who was sitting in the background, politely letting the ladies go first. "Look, Bonnie, don't you think I'm too red?
I know it'll all come off when you kiss me."
"If it comes off as easily as that, you'll be more fortunate than most of the people I make up"; and Patty smiled knowingly as she remembered how Priscilla had soaked half the night on the occasion of a previous play, and then had appeared at breakfast the next morning with lowering eyebrows and a hectic flush on each cheek. "You must remember that foot-lights take a lot of color," she explained condescendingly. "You'd look ghastly if I let you go the way you wanted to at first.
Next!
"No," said Patty, as the butler presented himself; "you don't come till the second act.
I'll take the Irate Parent first." The Irate Parent was dragged from a corner where he had been anxiously mumbling over his lines. "What's the matter?" asked Patty, as she began daubing in wrinkles with a liberal hand; "are you afraid?"
"N-no," said the Parent; "I'm not afraid, only I'm afraid that I will be afraid."
"You'd just better change your mind, then," said Patty, sternly. "We aren't going to allow any stage-fright to-night."
"Patty, you can manage Georgie Merriles; make her let me go on without any wig," cried Cynthia, returning and holding up to view a mass of yellow curls of a shade that was never produced in the course of nature.
Patty looked at the wig critically. "It is, perhaps, a trifle golden for the part."
"Golden!" said Cynthia. "It's positively orange.
Wait till you see how it lights up.
He calls me his dark-eyed beauty: and I'm sure no one with dark eyes, or any other kind of eyes, would have hair like that.
My own looks a great deal better."
"Why don't you wear your own, then?
Wrinkle up your forehead, Parent, and let me see which way they run."
"Georgie paid two dollars for renting it, and she's bound to get the money's worth of wear out of it, even if she makes me look like a fright and spoils the play."
"Nonsense," said Patty, pushing away the Parent and giving her undivided attention to the question. "Your own hair does look better.
Just mislay the wig and keep out of Georgie's way till the curtain goes up.
The audience are beginning to come," she announced to the room in general, "and you've got to keep still back there.
You're making an awful racket, and they can hear you all over the house.
Here, what are you making such a noise for?" she demanded of Lord Bromley, who came clumping up with footfalls which reverberated through the flies.
"I can't help it," he said crossly. "Look at these boots.
They're so big that I can step out of them without unlacing them."
"It's not my fault.
I haven't anything to do with the costumes."
"I know it; but what can I do?"
"Never mind," said Patty, soothingly; "they don't look so awfully bad.
You'll have to try and walk without raising your feet."
She went out on the stage, where Georgie was giving her last directions to the scene-shifters. "The minute the curtain goes down on the first act change this forest to the drawing-room scene, and don't make any noise hammering.
If you have to hammer, do it while the orchestra's playing.