‘There are the Stuarts,’ he said, bending down to her as the orchestra struck up, ’in the box to the left.  Forbes, I suppose, will join them when it begins.  I am told he has been working like a horse for this play.  Every detail in it, they say, is perfect, artistically and historically, and the time of preparation has been exceptionally short.  Why did she refuse to begin again with the White Lady, to give herself more time?’

’I cannot tell you, except that she had a repugnance to it which could not be got over.  I believe her associations with the play were so painful that it would have seemed an evil omen to her to begin a new season with it.’

‘Was she wise, I wonder?’

’I think she did well to follow her fancy in the matter, and she herself has had plenty of time.  She was working at it all the weeks she was with us, and young Harting, too, I think had notice enough.  Some of the smaller parts may go roughly to-night, but they will soon fall into shape.’

‘Poor Wallace!’ said Kendal; ’he must be wishing it well over.  I never saw a house better stocked with critics.’

‘Here he is,’ cried Madame de Chateauvieux, betraying her suppressed excitement in her nervous little start.  ’Oh, Mr. Wallace, how do you do? and how are things going?’

Poor Wallace threw himself into his seat, looking the picture of misery so far as his face, which Nature had moulded in one of her cheerfullest moods, was capable of it.

’My dear Madame de Chateauvieux, I have no more notion than the man in the moon.  Miss Bretherton is an angel, and without Forbes we should have collapsed a hundred times already, and that’s about all I know.  As for the other actors, I suppose they will get through their parts somehow, but at present I feel like a man at the foot of the gallows.  There goes the hell; now for it.’

The sketch for the play of Elvira had been found among the papers of a young penniless Italian who had died, almost of starvation, in his Roman garret, during those teeming years after 1830, when poets grew on every hedge and the romantic passion was abroad.  The sketch had appeared in a little privately-printed volume which Edward Wallace had picked up by chance on the Paris quays.  He had read it in an idle hour in a railway, had seen its capabilities, and had forthwith set to work to develop the sketch into a play.  But, in developing it, he had carefully preserved the character of the original conception.  It was a conception strictly of the Romantic time, and the execution of it presented very little of that variety of tone which modern audiences have learnt to expect.  The play told one rapid breathless story of love, jealousy, despair, and death, and it told it directly and uninterruptedly, without any lighter interludes.  Author and adapter alike had trusted entirely to the tragic force of the situation and the universality of the motives appealed to.  The diction of the piece was the diction of Alfred de Vigny or of the school of Victor Hugo.  It was, indeed, rather a dramatic love-poem than a play, in the modern sense, and it depended altogether for its success upon the two characters of Macias and Elvira.