The four days’ interval passed busily in perpetual rehearsals, public and private.  The night of performance arrived; the guests assembled; the great dramatic experiment stood on its trial.  Magdalen had made the most of her opportunities; she had learned all that the manager could teach her in the time.  Miss Garth left her when the overture began, sitting apart in a corner behind the scenes, serious and silent, with her smelling-bottle in one hand, and her book in the other, resolutely training herself for the coming ordeal, to the very last.

The play began, with all the proper accompaniments of a theatrical performance in private life; with a crowded audience, an African temperature, a bursting of heated lamp-glasses, and a difficulty in drawing up the curtain.  “Fag” and “the Coachman,” who opened the scene, took leave of their memories as soon as they stepped on the stage; left half their dialogue unspoken; came to a dead pause; were audibly entreated by the invisible manager to “come off”; and went off accordingly, in every respect sadder and wiser men than when they went on.  The next scene disclosed Miss Marrable as “Lydia Languish,” gracefully seated, very pretty, beautifully dressed, accurately mistress of the smallest words in her part; possessed, in short, of every personal resource—­except her voice.  The ladies admired, the gentlemen applauded.  Nobody heard anything but the words “Speak up, miss,” whispered by the same voice which had already entreated “Fag” and “the Coachman” to “come off.”  A responsive titter rose among the younger spectators; checked immediately by magnanimous applause.  The temperature of the audience was rising to Blood Heat—­but the national sense of fair play was not boiled out of them yet.

In the midst of the demonstration, Magdalen quietly made her first entrance, as “Julia.”  She was dressed very plainly in dark colors, and wore her own hair; all stage adjuncts and alterations (excepting the slightest possible touch of rouge on her cheeks) having been kept in reserve to disguise her the more effectually in her second part.  The grace and simplicity of her costume, the steady self-possession with which she looked out over the eager rows of faces before her, raised a low hum of approval and expectation.  She spoke—­after suppressing a momentary tremor—­with a quiet distinctness of utterance which reached all ears, and which at once confirmed the favorable impression that her appearance had produced.  The one member of the audience who looked at her and listened to her coldly, was her elder sister.  Before the actress of the evening had been five minutes on the stage, Norah detected, to her own indescribable astonishment, that Magdalen had audaciously individualized the feeble amiability of “Julia’s” character, by seizing no less a person than herself as the model to act it by.  She saw all her own little formal peculiarities of manner and movement unblushingly reproduced—­and even the very