use to make his
appearance, she left the piano, and stalking miserably about with the
preliminary cough with which the unfortunate Professor Trask was
afflicted, she sang her doleful recitative.

The Madigans were never literalists. They were of the impressionistic
school, which requires of the audience, as well as of the artist, high
imaginative powers. And here the audience of one moment was the actor of
the next, whose duty it was not to mind too closely the letter that
killeth, but to mimic irreverently, to exaggerate, to make of themselves
caricatures of the mannerisms of others, to nickname, to seize upon
every peculiarity with their quick, observant, cruel young eyes and
paint it in flesh-and-blood cartoons.

Thus, when the Rose, that "gentle flower in which a thorn is oft
concealed," sang her duet with the Nightingale (Sissy trilling weakly on
the piano, while Frank fluted her fingers affectedly as she had seen it
done that memorable night) it was done in the hollow, throaty tones of
the elder Miss Blind-Staggers, who had created the role; while the Lily
sang through her nose, which she wiped every now and then in a manner
unmistakably that of Henrietta Blind-Staggers.

"The Cantata of the Flowers" was never brought to a glorious completion
by the Madigans, even though they skipped uninteresting and difficult
parts, and, like the early Elizabethans, permitted no intermission
between acts. It was very often laughed to death. At times it became a
saturnalia of extravagant action, and it frequently ended in a free
fight, when the Rose and the Lily hinted too openly at the Recluse's
incurable tendency to sing off key. But that night it might have dragged
its saccharine length of melody to the coronation of the Rose and a
quick curtain if Miss Madigan had not walked right into the thick of it.

"Golly!" gasped Sissy, while Irene dodged behind Kate, who quickly
turned down the lamp, and a hush fell upon the rest.

But Miss Madigan had been writing, or rather rewriting, letters. She had
completely forgotten the heinous offense of the afternoon.

"Will you mail a letter for me, Sissy, the first thing in the morning?"
she asked, still preoccupied. "Why are you in the dark?"

"We're just going to bed," remarked Sissy, with soothing demureness,
taking the envelope from her aunt's hand and falling in with her mood,
as one does with the mentally afflicted.

When Miss Madigan, fatigued with the labor of composition, h