But he did dare. He was a nonchalant, smiling, insolent figure, leaning on his cane, as she went through the next performance. She pretended not to see him, but never for a moment, as she well knew, did his cold black eyes waver from their ironic but admiring contemplation of her enchanting little figure in purple satin trousers and green jacket.
And at the late afternoon performance--four o'clock--he was there again, his fine, cruel, humorous mouth smiling at his own folly. She thought of appealing to Gus, the barker, to forbid him admission to the tent, but she knew Gus was too good a business man to heed such a wasteful request. Besides, the barker seemed to like him, or at least to like immensely the bill which invariably passed hands when the showman and the glorified "rube" met.
Then suddenly, at ten minutes after four, the New Yorker ceased to have any significance at all to her, at least for the moment. He was wiped out completely in the flood of terror and joy that swept over her brain, making her so dizzy that she leaned against the crystal stand for support.
For tumbling into the tent of the Palace of Wonders came a horde of children, boys and girls, the girls dressed exactly alike in skimpy little white lawn dresses trimmed with five-cent lace, the boys in ugly suits of stiff "jeans."
Her playmates from the orphanage had come to see "Princess Lalla," lately Sally Ford, ward of the state and now fugitive from "justice."
Sally's first impulse, when she saw the children of the orphanage come tumbling into the Palace of Wonders tent, was to flee. She was so conscious of being Sally Ford, whose rightful place was with those staring, shy little girls in white lawn "Sunday" dresses, that she completely forgot for one moment of pure terror that to them she would merely be "Princess Lalla," favorite crystal-gazer to the Sultan of Turkey before she escaped from his harem.
Cowering low in her high-backed gilded chair, in an effort to make herself as small and inconspicuous as possible--a useless effort really, since she was by far the prettiest and most romantic figure in the tent, dressed as she was in Oriental trappings--she watched the children, whom she knew so well, with a pang of homesickness.