and held by gold-beaters' skin, I
was going to create dull white welts with angry red spaces painted
between--with strong sticking-plaster attached to my eyelid, I was going
to draw it from its natural position. Oh, I should have a rare scar! yet
that poor woman might herself see it without suspecting she had given me
the idea.

Oh, what a time of misery it was, the preparation of that play! Poor Mr.
Daly--and poor, poor Miss Morris!

You see everything hung upon the mad-scene. Yet, when we came to that, I
simply stood still and spoke the broken, disjointed words.

"But what are you going to do at night?" Mr. Daly cried. "Act your scene,
Miss Morris."

Act it, in cold blood, there, in the gray, lifeless daylight? with a
circle of grinning, sardonic faces, ready to be vastly amused over my
efforts? He might better have asked me to deliver a polished address in
beautiful, pellucid Greek, to compose at command a charming little
_rondeau_ in sparkling French, or a prayer in sonorous Latin--they would
have been easier for me to do, than to gibber, to laugh, to screech, to
whisper, whimper, rave, to crouch, crawl, stride, fall to order in
street-clothes, and always with those fiendish "guyers" ready to assist
in my undoing. Yet, poor Mr. Daly, too! I was sorry for him, he had so
much at stake. It _was_ asking a good deal of him to trust his fate
entirely, blindly to me.

"Oh!" I said, "I would if I could--do please believe me! I want to do as
you wish me to, but, dear Mr. Daly, I can't, my blood is cold in
daylight, I am ashamed, constrained! I cannot act then!"

"Well, give me some _faint_ idea of what you are going to do," he cried,
impatiently.

"Dear goodness!" I groaned, "I am going to try to do all sorts of
things--loud and quiet, fast and slow, close-eyed cunning, wide-eyed
terror! There, that's all I can tell about it!" and I burst into harassed
tears.

He said never another word, but I used to feel dreadfully when, at
rehearsals, he would rise and leave the stage as soon as we reached the
mad-scene.

Then it happened we could not produce the play on Monday. An old comedy
was put on for that one night. I was not in it, and Mr. Daly, seeing how
near I was to the breaking-point with hard work and terror, tried to give
me a bit of pleasure. He got tickets for my mother and me, and sent us to
the opera to hear Parepa and Wachtel. I was radiant with delight; but,
alas, when did I ever have such high spirits wit