"Sure I mean New York. We go into winter quarters there in November, and if you stick to the show I may be able to land you a job in the chorus. God knows you are pretty enough--just the type to make every six-footer want to fight any other man that looks at you."
"Oh, you're good to me!" Sally blinked away the last of her tears, which had streaked her brown make-up. "I'll stick, if the police don't get me--and David. And," she paused at the door, her eyes shy and sweet, "thank you so very much for trying to help me find my--my mother."
As she sped down the aisle of the car in her noiseless little red sandals she was startled to see what looked like a sheaf of yellow, dried grass whisked through the closing door of the women's dressing room. Then comprehension dawned. "I wonder," she took time from the contemplation of her desolating disappointment to muse, "what Nita is doing here. I wonder if she followed me--if she heard anything I wouldn't want Nita to know about my mother. But I'll tell David. Will he despise me because my mother was--bad?"
It was a sad, listless little "Princess Lalla" who cupped tiny brown hands about a crystal ball and pretended to read "past, present and future" in its mysterious depths as the afternoon crowd of the carnival's last day in Stanton milled about the attractions in the Palace of Wonders. There was the crack of an unsuspected whip in the voice of Gus, the barker, as he bent over her after his oft-repeated spiel:
"Snap into it, kid! These rubes is lousy with coin and we've got to get our share. You're crabbin' the act somethin' fierce's afternoon. Step on it!"
Sally made a valiant effort to obey, but her crystal-gazing that afternoon was not a riotous success. She made one or two bad blunders, the worst of which caused a near-panic.
For she was so absorbed in her own disappointment and in contemplating the effect of her news upon David, when she should tell him that she was an illegitimate child of a woman who had abandoned her, that her eyes and intuition were not so keen as they had been.
Although there had been a sharp-faced shrew of a wife clinging to his arm before he vaulted upon the platform for a "reading," she mechanically told a meek little middle-aged man that he was in love with a "zo beau-ti-ful girl wiz golden hair" and that he would "marry wiz her."