In four nights more the play was to be performed.  If ever any human enterprise stood in need of good wishes to help it, that enterprise was unquestionably the theatrical entertainment at Evergreen Lodge!

One arm-chair was allowed on the stage; and into that arm-chair Miss Marrable sank, preparatory to a fit of hysterics.  Magdalen stepped forward at the first convulsion; snatched the letter from Miss Marrable’s hand; and stopped the threatened catastrophe.

“She’s an ugly, bald-headed, malicious, middle-aged wretch!” said Magdalen, tearing the letter into fragments, and tossing them over the heads of the company.  “But I can tell her one thing—­she shan’t spoil the play.  I’ll act Julia.”

“Bravo!” cried the chorus of gentlemen—­the anonymous gentleman who had helped to do the mischief (otherwise Mr. Francis Clare) loudest of all.

“If you want the truth, I don’t shrink from owning it,” continued Magdalen.  “I’m one of the ladies she means.  I said she had a head like a mop, and a waist like a bolster.  So she has.”

“I am the other lady,” added the spinster relative.  “But I only said she was too stout for the part.”

“I am the gentleman,” chimed in Frank, stimulated by the force of example.  “I said nothing—­I only agreed with the ladies.”

Here Miss Garth seized her opportunity, and addressed the stage loudly from the pit.

“Stop!  Stop!” she said.  “You can’t settle the difficulty that way.  If Magdalen plays Julia, who is to play Lucy?”

Miss Marrable sank back in the arm-chair, and gave way to the second convulsion.

“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Magdalen, “the thing’s simple enough, I’ll act Julia and Lucy both together.”

The manager was consulted on the spot.  Suppressing Lucy’s first entrance, and turning the short dialogue about the novels into a soliloquy for Lydia Languish, appeared to be the only changes of importance necessary to the accomplishment of Magdalen’s project.  Lucy’s two telling scenes, at the end of the first and second acts, were sufficiently removed from the scenes in which Julia appeared to give time for the necessary transformations in dress.  Even Miss Garth, though she tried hard to find them, could put no fresh obstacles in the way.  The question was settled in five minutes, and the rehearsal went on; Magdalen learning Julia’s stage situations with the book in her hand, and announcing afterward, on the journey home, that she proposed sitting up all night to study the new part.  Frank thereupon expressed his fears that she would have no time left to help him through his theatrical difficulties.  She tapped him on the shoulder coquettishly with her part.  “You foolish fellow, how am I to do without you?  You’re Julia’s jealous lover; you’re always making Julia cry.  Come to-night, and make me cry at tea-time.  You haven’t got a venomous old woman in a wig to act with now.  It’s my heart you’re to break—­and of course I shall teach you how to do it.”