The play proceeded brilliantly, and now the power and originality of Priscilla’s acting divided the attention of the house.  Surely there never was a more impassioned Prince.

Priscilla could sing; her voice was not powerful, but it was low and rather deeply set.  The well-known and familiar song with which the Prince tried to woo Ida lost little at her hands.

  “O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South,
   Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,
   And tell her, tell her what I tell to thee. 
  “O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each,
   That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
   And dark and true and tender is the North. 
  “Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love,
   Delaying as the tender ash delays
   To clothe herself, when all the woods are green? 
  “O tell her, brief is life but love is long,
   And brief the sun of summer in the North,
   And brief the moon of beauty in the South. 
  “O Swallow, flying from the golden woods,
   Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine,
   And tell her, tell her that I follow thee.”

The wooing which followed made a curious impression; this impression was not only produced upon the house, but upon both Prince and Princess.

Priscilla, too, had encountered Hammond’s earnest gaze.  That gaze fired her heart, and she became once again not herself but he; poor, awkward and gauche little Prissie sank out of sight; she was Hammond pleading his own cause, she was wooing Maggie for him in the words of Tennyson’s Prince.  This fact was the secret of Priscilla’s power; she had felt it more or less whenever she acted the part of the Prince; but, on this occasion, she communicated the sensations which animated her own breast to Maggie.  Maggie, too, felt that Hammond was speaking to her through Priscilla’s voice.

  “I cannot cease to follow you, as they say
   The seal does music; who desire you more
   Than growing boys their manhood; dying lips,
   With many thousand matters left to do,
   The breath of life; O more than poor men wealth,
   Than sick men health—­ yours, yours, not mine—­ but half
   Without you; with you, whole; and of those halves
   You worthiest, and howe’er you block and bar
   Your heart with system out from mine, I hold
   That it becomes no man to nurse despair,
   But in the teeth of clench’d antagonisms
   To follow up the worthiest till he die.”

In the impassioned reply which followed this address it was noticed for the first time by the spectators that Maggie scarcely did herself justice.  Her exclamation—­

  “I wed with thee!  I, bound by precontract
   Your bride, your bondslave!”

was scarcely uttered with the scorn which such a girl would throw into the words if her heart went with them.

The rest of the play proceeded well, the Prince following up his advantage until his last words—­