‘D——­n it!  She hasn’t got much to learn, has she?’ the conductor murmured to the first violin, a professional from Manchester.

But her greatest efforts she reserved for the difficult and critical prose conversations which now alone remained to her, those dialogues which seem merely to exist for the purpose of separating the numbers allotted to all the other principals.  It was as though, during the entr’acte, surrounded by the paint-pots, the intrigues, and the wild confusion of the dressing-room, Millicent had been able to commune with herself, and to foresee and take arms against the peril of an anti-climax.  By sheer force, ingenuity, vivacity, flippancy, and sauciness, she lifted her lines to the level, and above the level, of the rest of the piece.  She carried the audience with her; she knew it; all her colleagues knew it, and if they chafed they chafed in secret.  The performance went better and better as the end approached.  The audience had long since ceased to notice defects; only the conductor, the leader, and a few discerning members of the troupe were aware that a catastrophe had been escaped by pure luck two minutes before the descent of the curtains.

And at that descent the walls of the Town Hall, which had echoed to political tirades, the solemn recitatives of oratorios, the mercantile uproar of bazaars, the banal compliments of prize-givings, the arid utterances of lecturers on science and art, and the moans of sinners stricken with a sense of guilt at religious revivals—­those walls resounded to a gay and frenzied ovation which is memorable in the town for its ungoverned transports of approval.  The Operatic Society as a whole was first acclaimed, all the performers posing in rank on the stage.  Then, as the deafening applause showed no sign of diminution, the curtains were drawn back instead of being raised again, and the principals, beginning with the humblest, paraded in pairs in front of the footlights.  Milly and her fortunate cavalier came last.  The cavalier advanced two paces, took Milly’s hand, signed to her to cross over, and retired.  The child was left solitary on the stage—­solitary, but unabashed, glowing with delight, and smiling as pertly as ever.  The leader of the orchestra stood up and handed her a wreath, which she accepted like an oath of fealty; and the wreath, hurriedly manufactured by the barmaid of the Tiger out of some cut flowers and the old laurel tree in the Tiger yard, became, when Milly grasped it, a mysterious and impressive symbol.  Many persons in the audience wanted to cry as they beheld this vision of the proud, confident, triumphant child holding the wreath, while the fierce upward ray of the footlights illuminated her small chin and her quivering nostrils.  She tripped off backwards, with a gesture of farewell.  The applause continued.  Would she return?  Not if the ferocious jealousies behind could have paralysed her as she hesitated in the wings.  But the world was on her side that night; she responded again, she kissed her hands to her world, and disappeared still kissing them; and the evening was finished.