Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/270

 was watching, in a malevolent silence, every movement of the actors; and he went stiff with an attack of stage fright. Miss Morris steadied him with a cordial clasp of the hand. "It's all right," she said under her voice. "No one is looking at us, you know. We're only to fill in a background. You turn around with me." He recovered himself as soon as their turning brought her between him and the audience. He laughed at himself when they reached the wings.

The scene was a "box-set," representing a jewellery shop with stools and counters; and the promenade of supers passed across an opening in the rear wall of the "set," where gaps of white gauze represented the plate glass of two huge display windows and a double door. While the first act worked itself out, in the loud voices of the principal actors near the footlights, Miss Morris and he crossed and recrossed the windows in this stream of "extras," or stood chatting with Walter Pittsey in the wings until it should be their turn to cross again. Her cheeks were flaming with rouge; her eyebrows were pencilled; her eyelashes were as thick as black pins with "cosmetique"; and these artificialities gave her beauty a coquettish enticement for Don. He was grateful to her for having held him up when he had faltered over the handkerchief. She smiled and chatted rather archly, enjoying his good spirits and the way in which his eyes clung to her, admiringly.

It was near the end of the act that he asked her, apropos of nothing: "By the way, how did my father know I had met you—here?"

They were in the middle of their passage across the