nd their mad
rushes, their yells of mirth filled the gloomy house with gaiety. And Lily
did not mind walking in with her gold-tasseled hat on. All those heads at
the windows: it was just like a fine lady visiting the poor. And yet she
was not proud now. Formerly, she would have laughed on learning the kind
of life led by the Three Graces, those three girls who remained good so as
not to break up the troupe and annoy Nunkie and who were said to spend
their spare time in sewing and cooking and doing Sandow exercises and
measuring one another round the biceps and the chest: simple joys, the
only true ones.

"They may be right, after all," thought Lily, who envied them from the
bottom of her heart for having the Astrarium. "If I had only practised
too! Practising is certainly better than attaching all that importance to
dresses or sending those puff photographs to the agents!"

A surprise awaited Lily when she entered the hotel; pros were talking with
a mysterious air. There was muttering in the corners, a piece of news was
going round: the Bijou Theater had closed, that very day; the treasury was
empty, bankrupt; everything sealed up; just on the eve of pay-day too!

[Illustration: THE BAMBINIS]

"My! Is it possible?" thought Lily, distracted and forgetting the
Astrarium and the Three Graces. "And what am I to do for food to-morrow?
Come, quick, Glass-Eye!" she whispered, catching her a thump in the ribs.
"To the theater, quick!"

For Lily knew by experience that it was a good thing to be first. Her Pa
had saved his salary once, in a similar case, at Perth, in Australia; but
one must arrive in time.

CHAPTER V

There was a crowd in front of the Bijou when she arrived. They were
commenting on a notice pasted on the door:

"_Ferme_."

What could that mean? Lily had not provided for this in her vocabulary of
the French language; but the theater was closed until new arrangements
could be made. It meant complete ruin, enforced idleness....

"The rotten lot!" growled Lily. "Money, damn it, money! Pay up, you pack
of thieves!"

But Lily soon recovered herself, when she saw that there was nothing to be
done. She had been through worse than that, when the iron curtain all but
smashed her to a jelly, at Milwaukee, and when she tumbled into the
orchestra, at Glasgow! Notwithstanding the anguish that wrung her inside
and heralded the coming hunger, Lily put a good face on the matter before
all those people, like