“What do you think?”

“You’re a clever woman; you will no doubt arrive at a very logical and clear conception of the part, but—­”

“But we cannot act what is not in us.  Is that what you were going to say?”

“Something like that.”

“You think I shall arrive at a logical and clear conception.  Is that the way you think I arrived at my Margaret?  Did it look like that?  I may play the part of Elizabeth badly, but I sha’n’t play it as you think I shall.  This frock is against me.  I’ve a mind to send you away.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Instead of rushing wildly from side to side according to custom, she advanced timidly, absorbed in deep memory; at every glance her face expressed a recollection; she seemed to alternate between a vague dread and an unconquerable delight; she seemed like a dim sky filled with an inner radiance, but for a time it seemed uncertain which would prevail—­sunlight or shadow.  But, like the sunlight, joy burst forth, scattering uncertainty and alarm, illuminating life from end to end; and her emotion vented itself in cries of April melody, and all the barren stage seemed in flower about her; she stood like a bird on a branch singing the spring time.  And she sang every note with the same ease, each was equally round and clear, but what delighted Ulick was the perfect dramatic expression of her singing.  It seemed to him that he was really listening to a very young girl who had just heard of the return of a man whom she had loved or might have loved.  A bud last night slept close curled in virginal strictness, with the morning light it awoke a rose.  But the core of the rose is still hidden from the light, only the outer leaves know it, and so Elizabeth is pure in her first aspiration; she rejoices as the lark rejoices in the sky, without desiring to possess the sky.  Ulick could not explain to himself the obsession of this singing; he was thrall to the sensation of a staid German princess of the tenth century, and the wearing of a large hat with ostrich feathers, and tied with a blue veil, hindered no whit of it.  And the tailor-made dress and six years of liaison with Owen Asher was no let to the mediaeval virgin formulated in antique custom.  In the duet with Tannhaeuser she was benign and forgiving, the divine penitent who, having no sins of her own to do penance for, does penance for the sins of others.

It was then that Ulick began to understand the secret of Evelyn’s acting; in Elizabeth she had gone back to the Dulwich days before she knew Asher, and was acting what she then felt and thought.  She believed she was living again with her father, and so intense was her conviction that it evoked the externals.  Even her age vanished; she was but eighteen, a virgin whose sole reality has been her father and her chatelaine, and whose vision of the world was, till now, a mere decoration—­sentinels on the drawbridge, hunters assembling on the hillside, pictures hardly more real to her than those she weaves on her tapestry loom.