hispered Grace
disgustedly, "and she'll never get it at all."

Just then Anne turned on her pillow and opened her eyes. They looked
straight at David, who was sitting in the front of the box. He pointed
deliberately at the chrysanthemum.

"She sees it," said Jessica, for Anne's eyes were now fixed on the
flower.

When the kind Irishman departed to spend his last cent on medicine and
food for the dying girl, she rose, staggered across the stage, seized
the chrysanthemum and rushed back again, just in time to be lying prone
when her father entered, now a repentant and sorrowful sinner.

"It's all right," whispered Grace in a relieved tone. "I feel sure that
the plan will work to perfection."

Anne _did_ die a stage death, and there was not a dry eye in the house
when she forgave her father, bade farewell to the entire company, who
had now gathered in the attic, and her soul passed out to soft music
while the lights were turned very low.

"Fire! Fire!" rang out a voice from the darkened house.

Where did the voice come from? Nora and Jessica were so startled they
could only clutch each other and wonder, while Grace whispered:

"Don't move from your seats."

"Grace, was that your voice?" whispered David, who had joined the girls
during the death-bed scene.

But Grace made no reply. She only put her finger to her lips as she held
his arm with a detaining hand.

There was a panic in the house. The audience rushed for the doors while
the actors leaped over the footlights in their mad scramble to escape.
Several women's voices took up the cry of fire and the place was in wild
confusion. Evidently the man who managed the lights had been too
frightened to turn them on again, for the theater still remained in
semi-darkness.

The four young people did not move while the audience was crowding out
of the aisles.

"We might as well be suffocated as crushed," observed David. "It's a
much more comfortable death, and besides I can't smell any smoke."

Grace smiled but was silent.

"I'm here at last," announced Anne's well-known voice behind them.

And there she was, still in her ragged stage dress, carrying her hat and
coat on her arm.

"Why, Anne Pierson!" cried Nora, "I thought you were dead and gone."

Anne laughed.

"Not dead," she said. "But I would certainly have been gone in another
half hour. We needn't hurry," she continued. "I don't believe he would
ever think of looking for me inside the theater, and,