This part of the evening's pleasures Varney did not see. He rose with
many others when the published tidings of refreshment gave notice that
the speechmaking was over, and turned his face toward the door against a
stream of ushers entering with alluring trays. Already all sense of the
daring brilliance of Peter's stroke had faded and dropped from his mind.
His own concerns crowded instantly upon his attention, and all his
thought was of finding Mary Carstairs immediately and compelling her to
recognize him for the man he was.
She, too, had risen to leave the hall. While he listened to the fierce
philippic of J. Pinkney Hare, Varney's eye had carefully marked her
seat: it was empty now. Once, as he pushed his way slowly toward the
door, he caught a brief glimpse of her over in the other aisle, some
distance ahead of him; but he hardly saw her before she was lost to him
again, swallowed up in the jostling throng. The theatre was in an
uproar: all was noise and bustle and movement. And the wide lobby, when
at length he reached it, was no better; it looked scarcely more
promising to his quest than the traditional haystack to the searcher of
needles.
Here were set the ice-cream freezers and the other paraphernalia of
delight, and about them was a struggling mob. Varney circled the throng
with a roving eye. Of the lady he saw no sign anywhere. But presently,
on the outer fringe of the cohorts which stormed the freezers, he came
upon the child Jenny, and knew that he had found a guide according to
his heart's desire.
He touched her on the elbow. "Do you want to get some ice-cream?"
She turned her homely little face up towards him, and said shyly:
"Yes, sir. But they won't let me get near. And they say the chocolate is
going fast."
"They'll let me get near," said Varney heartily. "Chocolate is it, then?
Lemonade, of course. And a thought of the cake with icing, shall we say?
Good! But you're not here alone, are you?"
"No, sir. I'm here with Miss Mary--over there in that corner."
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