When the usher, with the manner of his kind, darted down the aisle until he was some eight or ten steps in advance of the party, the child hurried forward a little, and then turned about, her face alight with eagerness; and suddenly she stood still until Mrs. Baron came up to her, and seized that amazed lady’s hand and laid her cheek against it and patted it rapidly. “It’s all right, child,” whispered Mrs. Baron warningly, in dread of a scene; but her voice was like a caress, and her eyes were beaming with joy. She was thinking how little she had had to sacrifice, and how very well worth while the sacrifice had been. Truly, it would have been cruel to deprive the child of a pleasure which meant so much to her. The man who stood with his big bass fiddle in the orchestra pit was making a dreadful noise on one string--sawing it rapidly--when the usher flung down a row of seats. Mrs. Baron went in first, followed by Bonnie May. Baron took the next seat, leaving the aisle seat to Baggot. The overture ended, and the orchestra leader laid down his baton, while he and his musicians began to adjust themselves in easy positions in their chairs. Somewhere a man at a switchboard performed his duty, and one light after another went out until the theatre was in darkness. Then the curtain lifted. But to Baron it all meant less the story of Paula Tanqueray, up there on the stage, than it did the story of Bonnie May, close by his side. Tanqueray’s friends discussed his approaching marriage and his bride to be; the argument of the drama received its simple statement, and presently the ill-starred woman appeared. But through it all Baron knew that his thoughts were chiefly with the child by his side. She was so completely lost in the rapture of every passing moment that he felt a strange uneasiness. Here was something more than a normal enjoyment. She had the extraordinary gift of being able to appraise the value of the make-believe--to gauge the truth of every look and word and movement, and at the same time to lose herself in the story. She clasped and unclasped her hands in silent, painful intensity; there were little, strange movements of her head as a result of her acute sympathy with the work of the playwright and players alike. And sometimes she hung upon a word that halted, and smiled with rapture when a difficulty was surmounted. Baron thought, grotesquely enough, of a little fish fallen from a hook into the grass for a breathless moment, and then getting back into its proper element and rushing away with a mighty flicking of tail and fins. Bonnie May had been of the theatre once, and Baron realized, as he watched her, that somehow, sometime, she would return to it again. When, at the end, the report of a pistol was heard, and the stepdaughter of Mrs. Tanqueray came screaming upon the stage, Mrs. Baron set her lips in a hard line. “Nobody to blame but herself!” was her comment. She, too, had been deeply impressed by the play.