Dr. Osborne_. We parted that day with the question unanswered.

At next rehearsal I still wondered how I was to die, hard or easy, rigid
or limp, slow or quick. "Oh," I exclaimed, "I must know whether I am to
die in a second or to begin in the first act." And in my own exaggerated,
impatient words I found my first hint--"why _not_ begin to die in the
first act?"

When we again took up the question, I asked, eagerly: "What are those two
collapses caused by--the one at the mirror, the other at the school-table
with the children?"

"Extreme emotion," I was answered.

"Then," I asked, "why not extreme emotion acting upon a weak heart?"

Mr. Palmer was for the heart trouble from the first--he saw its
possibilities, saw that it was new, comparatively speaking at least--I
suppose nothing is really new--and decided in its favor; but for some
reason the little man Cazauran was piqued, and the result was that he
introduced just one single line, that could faintly indicate that _Miss
Multon_ was a victim of heart disease--in the first act, where, after a
violent exclamation from the lady, _Dr. Osborne_ said: "Oh, I thought it
was your heart again," and on eight words of foundation I was expected to
raise a superstructure of symptoms true enough to nature to be readily
recognized as indicating heart disease; and yet oh, difficult task! that
disease must not be allowed to obtrude itself into first place, nor must
it be too poignantly expressed. In brief, we decided I was to show to the
public a case of heart disease, ignored by its victim and only recognized
among the characters about her by the doctor.

And verily my work was cut out for me. Why, when I went to the Doctors
Seguin to be coached, I could not even locate my heart correctly by half
a foot. Both father and son did all they could to teach me the full
horror of _angina pectoris_, which I would, of course, tone down for
artistic reasons. And to this day tears rise in my eyes when I recall the
needless cruelty of the younger Seguin, in running a heart patient up a
long flight of stairs, that I might see the gasping of the gray-white
mouth for breath, the flare and strain of her waxy nostrils. Then, in
remorseful generosity, though heaven knows her coming was no act of mine,
I made her a little gift, and as she was slipping the bill inside her
well-mended glove, her eye caught the number on its corner, and, she must
have been very poor, her tormented and tormenting hear