Then I adventured again, alone; and harvested a sensation. For, while I was standing in the left wings, between two blocks of scenery, with my skirts furled as close as the fashion of the day would allow, to avoid casual tacks, Teddy Johns came off, followed by a gratifying, yet somehow a little awesome, burst of applause. He stood close beside me breathing hard, for his humour was largely acrobatic, and dabbing the perspiration from his forehead and cheeks with a corner of handkerchief, daintily so as not to mar his paint. And the audience clamoured a recall. I suppose there were not more than a couple of hundred people in the ballroom, yet the noise they made was deafening in so contracted a space; there was something formidable and pitiless in that great insistent voice. Sudden comprehension of what stage-fright might be came to me, and I looked at Teddy with admiring wonder. What must it be to face that hydra of a creature, that thing of many souls fused into one unthinkable whole out there beyond the footlights! "Weren't you frightened?" I whispered. He turned towards me--and it was not Teddy Johns at all! It was a man I had never seen before. I was so startled I could only gasp and stutter; the light was good enough, yet I thought it must have misled me, and peered into his face anxiously, expecting his familiar chuckle. His features were a mask of paint, apparently laid on at random, but as I know now, with real skill and knowledge of effect; he wore false eyebrows and a wig with a grotesque "slat" sunbonnet pushed halfway off, and held by the strings knotted under his chin. His body was padded shapelessly. And while I strove to find Teddy under this disguise, he suddenly bestowed on me a grin so vicious and repellent, that I almost screamed aloud. Whether that expression of amusement was involuntary on Huddesley's part, or whether he feigned it out of deliberate deviltry, I have often wondered. I must have uttered some sort of queer noise, for he said in a biting whisper: "Hold your tongue, you--fool!" and in the same breath was back on the stage, bowing to the tumult. He made the leader of the orchestra a sign, the instruments crashed out the opening bars of his song, and he began over again. I did not faint or go into hysterics, for I was a healthy and after all a tolerably sensible young woman; but it is impossible to convey any idea of my bewilderment. Fortunately it lasted only a moment or so. Huddesley made his second exit to the right, for the sake of variety, maybe; and the Chorus, crossing the stage, stationed himself in the wings almost at my side, that he might be heard jodeling "off," in stage-phrase. "No, that isn't Teddy," he whispered, in answer to my excited murmur. "Yo-de-la-_hee-ho_!--Teddy's sick, that's the doctor's man--La-he, la-he, la-he, ho!--Huddesley, you know; they got him to take Ted's place, mighty lucky he can, too--Yo-de-la--_hee_-ho, yo-de-la-a-a!" FOOTNOTE: