“Could you be two old women?” she asked, the instant Leslie opened.  “Ginevra Thoresby has given out.  She says it’s her cold,—­that she doesn’t feel equal to it; but the amount of it is she got her chill with the Shannons going away so suddenly, and the Amy Robsart and Queen Elizabeth picture being dropped.  There was nothing else to put her in, and so she won’t be Barbara.”

“Won’t be Barbara Frietchie!” cried Leslie, with an astonishment as if it had been angelhood refused.

“No.  Barbara Frietchie is only an old woman in a cap and kerchief, and she just puts her head out of a window:  the flag is the whole of it, Ginevra Thoresby says.”

“May I do it?  Do you think I can be different enough in the two?  Will there be time?” Leslie questioned eagerly.

“We’ll change the programme, and put ‘Taking the Oath’ between.  The caps can be different, and you can powder your hair for one, and—­would it do to ask Miss Craydocke for a front for the other?” Sin Saxon had grown delicate in her feeling for the dear old friend whose hair had once been golden.

“I’ll tell her about it, and ask her to help me contrive.  She’ll be sure to think of anything that can be thought of.”

“Only there’s the dance afterward, and you had so much more costume for the other,” Sin Saxon said demurringly.

“Never mind.  I shall be Barbara; and Barbara wouldn’t dance, I suppose.”

“Mother Hubbard would, marvelously.”

“Never mind,” Leslie answered again, laying down the little slipper, finished.

“She don’t care what she is, so that she helps along,” Sin Saxon said of her, rejoining the others in the hall.  “I’m ashamed of myself and all the rest of you, beside her.  Now make yourselves as fine as you please.”

We must pass over the hours as only stories and dreams do, and put ourselves, at ten of the clock that night, behind the green curtain and the footlights, in the blaze of the three rows of bright lamps, that, one above another, poured their illumination from the left upon the stage, behind the wide picture-frame.

Susan Josselyn and Frank Scherman were just “posed” for “Consolation.”  They had given Susan this part, after all, because they wanted Martha for “Taking the Oath,” afterward.  Leslie Goldthwaite was giving a hasty touch to the tent drapery and the gray blanket; Leonard Brookhouse and Dakie Thayne manned the halyards for raising the curtain; there was the usual scuttling about the stage for hasty clearance; and Sin Saxon’s hand was on the bell, when Grahame Lowe sprang hastily in through the dressing-room upon the scene.

“Hold on a minute,” he said to Brookhouse.  “Miss Saxon, General Ingleside and party are over at Green’s,—­been there since nine o’clock.  Oughtn’t we to send compliments or something, before we finish up?”