tone of her voice so accurately mimicked from time to time, that the accents startled her as if she was speaking herself, with an echo on the stage.  The effect of this cool appropriation of Norah’s identity to theatrical purposes on the audience—­who only saw results—­asserted itself in a storm of applause on Magdalen’s exit.  She had won two incontestable triumphs in her first scene.  By a dexterous piece of mimicry, she had made a living reality of one of the most insipid characters in the English drama; and she had roused to enthusiasm an audience of two hundred exiles from the blessings of ventilation, all simmering together in their own animal heat.  Under the circumstances, where is the actress by profession who could have done much more?

But the event of the evening was still to come.  Magdalen’s disguised re-appearance at the end of the act, in the character of “Lucy”—­with false hair and false eyebrows, with a bright-red complexion and patches on her cheeks, with the gayest colors flaunting in her dress, and the shrillest vivacity of voice and manner—­fairly staggered the audience.  They looked down at their programmes, in which the representative of Lucy figured under an assumed name; looked up again at the stage; penetrated the disguise; and vented their astonishment in another round of applause, louder and heartier even than the last.  Norah herself could not deny this time that the tribute of approbation had been well deserved.  There, forcing its way steadily through all the faults of inexperience—­there, plainly visible to the dullest of the spectators, was the rare faculty of dramatic impersonation, expressing itself in every look and action of this girl of eighteen, who now stood on a stage for the first time in her life.  Failing in many minor requisites of the double task which she had undertaken, she succeeded in the one important necessity of keeping the main distinctions of the two characters thoroughly apart.  Everybody felt that the difficulty lay here—­everybody saw the difficulty conquered—­everybody echoed the manager’s enthusiasm at rehearsal, which had hailed her as a born actress.

When the drop-scene descended for the first time, Magdalen had concentrated in herself the whole interest and attraction of the play.  The audience politely applauded Miss Marrable, as became the guests assembled in her father’s house:  and good-humoredly encouraged the remainder of the company, to help them through a task for which they were all, more or less, palpably unfit.  But, as the play proceeded, nothing roused them to any genuine expression of interest when Magdalen was absent from the scene.  There was no disguising it:  Miss Marrable and her bosom friends had been all hopelessly cast in the shade by the new recruit whom they had summoned to assist them, in the capacity of forlorn hope.  And this on Miss Marrable’s own birthday! and this in her father’s house! and this after the unutterable sacrifices of six weeks past!  Of all the domestic disasters which the thankless theatrical enterprise had inflicted on the Marrable family, the crowning misfortune was now consummated by Magdalen’s success.