The girl gave her shoulders an impatient shrug and drew her eyebrows together in a scowl of irritation. But her face cleared as she saw Miss Blake buying their tickets at the box-office. "Get them good and up front," she begged. "If we're way back we can't see a thing." The governess hesitated an instant; then a curious expression came over her face and she said, deliberately, "Very well, dear! Up front they shall be." The house was quite full and Nan thought it a singular piece of good fortune that there were places left just where she would have chosen to sit. "Just think of having come so late and yet being able to get the best seats in the house," she said, exultantly. Miss Blake smiled. She understood better than Nan did why the majority of the audience preferred places that were not so near the stage. Both she and the girl herself soon forgot everything else in their interest in the mysterious tricks that were being performed before their eyes. Of course they knew that all this magic could be explained, but just at the moment it appeared difficult to imagine how. A man seems really no less than a magician who can take a red billiard ball from, no one knows where, out of mid-air, apparently, and suddenly nipping off the end, transform it into two, each equally as large as the first. Presently he thinks you would like to have a third, and, presto! he draws one out from his elbow. Now a white one for a change! But it is easy enough to get a white one. He opens his mouth and there it is, held between his teeth. Then he thinks he will swallow a red one. Pop! it is gone! A moment later he takes it out of the top of his head. Nan noticed that as the performance progressed the tricks grew "curiouser and curiouser," as Alice would say, and the wizard seemed to take his audience more and more into his confidence. He no longer confined himself to the stage, but came tripping down the steps that led from the platform to the middle aisle and addressed, first this one and then that from among his spectators--only Nan again noticed that these always happened to be sitting as they were themselves, in the foremost seats. He induced a man just in front of her to come upon the stage to "assist" him in one of his "experiments," and the girl trembled lest at any moment he might demand a similar favor of her, for though she was reckless enough as a general thing, she had sufficient delicacy to dread being made conspicuous in such a place as this. "O Miss Blake," she whispered in the governess' ear, "can't we move back a little? If he should make me go up there I'd sink through the floor!" "Probably you would. No doubt he would let you down himself--through a trap-door. No, we must stay where we are and we must bear it as best we may. Perhaps he will overlook us."