Van Bibber put his cigar into a tumbler and stepped out into the wings.  They were crowded on both sides of the stage with the members of the company; the girls were tiptoeing, with their hands on the shoulders of the men, and making futile little leaps into the air to get a better view, and others were resting on one knee that those behind might see over their shoulders.  There were over a dozen children before the footlights, with the prima donna in the centre.  She was singing the verses of a song, and they were following her movements, and joining in the chorus with high piping voices.  They seemed entirely too much at home and too self-conscious to please Van Bibber; but there was one exception.  The one exception was the smallest of them, a very, very little girl, with long auburn hair and black eyes; such a very little girl that every one in the house looked at her first, and then looked at no one else.  She was apparently as unconcerned to all about her, excepting the pretty prima donna, as though she were by a piano at home practising a singing lesson.  She seemed to think it was some new sort of a game.  When the prima donna raised her arms, the child raised hers; when the prima donna courtesied, she stumbled into one, and straightened herself just in time to get the curls out of her eyes, and to see that the prima donna was laughing at her, and to smile cheerfully back, as if to say, “We are doing our best anyway, aren’t we?” She had big, gentle eyes and two wonderful dimples, and in the excitement of the dancing and the singing her eyes laughed and flashed, and the dimples deepened and disappeared and reappeared again.  She was as happy and innocent looking as though it were nine in the morning and she were playing school at a kindergarten.  From all over the house the women were murmuring their delight, and the men were laughing and pulling their mustaches and nudging each other to “look at the littlest one.”

The girls in the wings were rapturous in their enthusiasm, and were calling her absurdly extravagant titles of endearment, and making so much noise that Kripps stopped grinning at her from the entrance, and looked back over his shoulder as he looked when he threatened fines and calls for early rehearsal.  And when she had finished finally, and the prima donna and the children ran off together, there was a roar from the house that went to Lester’s head like wine, and seemed to leap clear across the footlights and drag the children back again.

“That settles it!” cried Lester, in a suppressed roar of triumph.  “I knew that child would catch them.”

There were four encores, and then the children and Elise Broughten, the pretty prima donna, came off jubilant and happy, with the Littlest Girl’s arms full of flowers, which the management had with kindly forethought prepared for the prima donna, but which that delightful young person and the delighted leader of the orchestra had passed over to the little girl.