“Nervous,” remarked the captain, indulgently.  “Not at all a bad sign.  The greatest actresses on the stage are nervous.  Follow their example, and get over it.  Where are the parts?  Oh, here they are!  Very nicely written, and remarkably clean.  I’ll give you the cues—­it will all be over (as the dentists say) in no time.  Take the back drawing-room for the stage, and take me for the audience.  Tingle goes the bell; up runs the curtain; order in the gallery, silence in the pit—­enter Lucy!”

She tried hard to control herself; she forced back the sorrow—­the innocent, natural, human sorrow for the absent and the dead—­pleading hard with her for the tears that she refused.  Resolutely, with cold, clinched hands, she tried to begin.  As the first familiar words passed her lips, Frank came back to her from the sea, and the face of her dead father looked at her with the smile of happy old times.  The voices of her mother and her sister talked gently in the fragrant country stillness, and the garden-walks at Combe-Raven opened once more on her view.  With a faint, wailing cry, she dropped into a chair; her head fell forward on the table, and she burst passionately into tears.

Captain Wragge was on his feet in a moment.  She shuddered as he came near her, and waved him back vehemently with her hand.  “Leave me!” she said; “leave me a minute by myself!” The compliant Wragge retired to the front room; looked out of the window; and whistled under his breath.  “The family spirit again!” he said.  “Complicated by hysterics.”

After waiting a minute or two he returned to make inquiries.

“Is there anything I can offer you?” he asked.  “Cold water? burned feathers? smelling salts? medical assistance?  Shall I summon Mrs. Wragge?  Shall we put it off till to-morrow?”

She started up, wild and flushed, with a desperate s elf-command in her face, with an angry resolution in her manner.

“No!” she said.  “I must harden myself—­and I will!  Sit down again and see me act.”

“Bravo!” cried the captain.  “Dash at it, my beauty—­and it’s done!”

She dashed at it, with a mad defiance of herself—­with a raised voice, and a glow like fever in her cheeks.  All the artless, girlish charm of the performance in happier and better days was gone.  The native dramatic capacity that was in her came, hard and bold, to the surface, stripped of every softening allurement which had once adorned it.  She would have saddened and disappointed a man with any delicacy of feeling.  She absolutely electrified Captain Wragge.  He forgot his politeness, he forgot his long words.  The essential spirit of the man’s whole vagabond life burst out of him irresistibly in his first exclamation.  “Who the devil would have thought it?  She can act, after all!” The instant the words escaped his lips he recovered himself, and glided off into his ordinary colloquial channels.  Magdalen stopped him in the middle of his first compliment.  “No,” she said; “I have forced the truth out of you for once.  I want no more.”