As she spoke, the orchestra, which was a good one, and perhaps the most satisfactory feature in the performance, broke into some weird Mendelssohnian music, and when the note of plaintiveness and mystery had been well established, the curtain rose upon the great armoury of the castle, a dim indistinguishable light shining upon its fretted roof and masses of faintly gleaming steel.  The scene which followed, in which the Countess Hilda, disguised as the traditional phantom of the Hohenzollerns, whose appearance bodes misfortune and death to those who behold it, throws herself across the path of her rival in the hope of driving her and those interested in her by sheer force of terror from the castle and from Berlin, had been poetically conceived, and it furnished Miss Bretherton with an admirable opportunity.  As the White Lady, gliding between rows of armed and spectral figures on either hand, and startling the Princess and her companion by her sudden apparition in a gleam of moonlight across the floor, she was once more the representative of all that is most poetical and romantic in physical beauty.  Nay, more than this; as she flung her white arms above her head, or pointed to the shrinking and fainting figure of her rival while she uttered her wailing traditional prophecy of woe, her whole personality seemed to be invested with a dramatic force of which there had been no trace in the long and violent scene with the Prince.  It was as though she was in some sort capable of expressing herself in action and movement, while in all the arts of speech she was a mere crude novice.  At any rate, there could be no doubt that in this one scene she realised the utmost limits of the author’s ideal, and when she faded into the darkness beyond the moonlight in which she had first appeared, the house, which had been breathlessly silent during the progress of the apparition, burst into a roar of applause, in which Wallace and Kendal heartily joined.

‘Exquisite!’ said Kendal in Mrs. Stuart’s ear, as he stood behind her chair.  ’She was romance itself!  Her acting should always be a kind of glorified and poetical pantomime; she would be inimitable so.’

Mrs. Stuart looked up and smiled agreement.  ’Yes, that scene lives with one.  If everything else in the play is poor, she is worth seeing for that alone. Remember it!’

The little warning was in season, for the poor White Lady had but too many after opportunities of blurring the impression she had made.  In the great situation at the end of the second act, in which the Countess has to give, in the presence of the Court, a summary of the supposed story of the White Lady, her passion at once of love and hatred charges it with a force and meaning which, for the first time, rouses the suspicions of the Prince as to the reality of the supposed apparition.  In the two or three fine and dramatic speeches which the situation involved, the actress showed the same absence of knowledge and resources as before, the same