Lovely as the picture is, it was lovelier in the living tableau.  There was something deep and intense in the pale calm of Susan Josselyn’s face, which they had not counted on even when they discovered that hers was the very face for the “Sister.”  Something made you thrill at the thought of what those eyes would show, if the downcast, quiet lids were raised.  The earnest gaze of the dying soldier met more, perhaps, in its uplifting; for Frank Scherman had a look, in this instant of enacting, that he had never got before in all his practicings.  The picture was too real for applause,—­almost, it suddenly seemed, for representation.

“Don’t I know that face, Noll?” General Ingleside asked, in a low tone, of his companion.

Instead of answering at once, the younger man bent further forward toward the stage, and his own very plain, broad, honest face, full over against the downcast one of the Sister of Mercy, took upon itself that force of magnetic expression which makes a look felt even across a crowd of other glances, as if there were but one straight line of vision, and that between such two.  The curtain was going slowly down; the veiling lids trembled, and the paleness replaced itself with a slow-mounting flush of color over the features, still held motionless.  They let the cords run more quickly then.  She was getting tired, they said; the curtain had been up too long.  Be that as it might, nothing could persuade Susan Josselyn to sit again, and “Consolation” could not be repeated.

So then came “Mother Hubbard and her Dog”—­the slow old lady and the knowing beast that was always getting one step ahead of her.  The possibility had occurred to Leslie Goldthwaite as she and Dakie Thayne amused themselves one day with Captain Green’s sagacious Sir Charles Grandison, a handsome black spaniel, whose trained accomplishment was to hold himself patiently in any posture in which he might be placed, until the word of release was given.  You might stand him on his hind legs, with paws folded on his breast; you might extend him on his back, with helpless legs in air; you might put him in any attitude possible to be maintained, and maintain it he would, faithfully, until the signal was made.  From this prompting came the illustration of Mother Hubbard.  Also, Leslie Goldthwaite had seized the hidden suggestion of application, and hinted it in certain touches of costume and order of performance.  Nobody would think, perhaps, at first, that the striped scarlet and white petticoat under the tucked-up train, or the common print apron of dark blue, figured with innumerable little white stars, meant anything beyond the ordinary adjuncts of a traditional old woman’s dress; but when, in the second scene, the bonnet went on,—­an ancient marvel of exasperated front and crown, pitched over the forehead like an enormous helmet, and decorated, upon the side next the audience, with black and white eagle plumes springing straight up from the fastening of an American shield; above