The play that up to this point had been considered a little tedious now engaged the attention of the audience, and when the Queen entered she was greeted with roars of laughter.  The applause was deafening.  Olive played her part better than had been expected, and all the white frocks trembled with excitement.  The youths in the left-hand corner craned their heads forward so as not to lose a syllable of what was coming; the Bishop recrossed his legs in a manner that betokened his entire satisfaction; and, delighted, the mammas and papas whispered together.  But the faces of the nuns betrayed the anxiety they felt.  Inquiring glances passed beneath the black hoods; all the sleek faces grew alive and alarmed.  May was now alone on the stage, and there was no saying what indiscretion she might not be guilty of.

The Reverend Mother, however, had anticipated the danger of the scene, and had sent round word to the nun in charge of the back of the stage to tell Miss Gould that she was to set the crown straight on her head, and to take her hands out of her pockets.  The effect of receiving such instructions from the wings was that May forgot one-half her words, and spoke the other half so incorrectly that the passage Alice had counted on so much—­’At last, thank Heaven, that tiresome trouble is over, and I am free to return to music and poetry’—­was rendered into nonsense, and the attention of the audience lost.  Nor were matters set straight until a high soprano voice was heard singing: 

’Buy, buy, who will buy roses of me? 
Roses to weave in your hair. 
A penny, only a penny for three,
Roses a queen might wear! 
Roses!  I gathered them far away
In gardens, white and red. 
Roses!  Make presents of roses to-day
And help me to earn my bread.’

The King divined that this must be the ballad-singer—­the beggar-maid who loved him, who, by some secret emissaries of the Queen, had been driven away from the city, homeless and outcast; and, snatching his lute from the wall, he sang a few plaintive verses in response.  The strain was instantly taken up, and then, on the current of a plain religious melody, the two voices were united, and, as two perfumes, they seemed to blend and become one.

Alice would have preferred something less ethereal, for the exigencies of the situation demanded that the King should get out of the window and claim the hand of the beggar-maid in the public street.  But the nun who had composed the music could not be brought to see this, and, after a comic scene between the Queen and the Chancellor, the King, followed by his Court and suite, entered, leading the beggar-maid by the hand.  In a short speech he told how her sweetness, her devotion, and, above all, her beautiful voice, had won his heart, and that he intended to make her his Queen.  A back cloth went up, and it disclosed a double throne, and as the young bride ascended the steps to take her place by the side of her royal husband, a joyful chorus was sung, in which allusion was made to a long reign and happy days.