rself when dinner was over, Jessie sat quietly down in her
lonely little room to think.

She wondered how such people as she had met that day could play the
different parts in the beautiful story whose every incident Manager
Morgan had explained to her.

"Certainly it isn't very romantic," she thought, "to have the hero lover
of the play a married man."

Night came at last, and feeling more frightened than she had ever felt
in her life before, Jessie emerged from her dressing-room. Mally Marsh
accompanied her to the wing to see that she went on all right when her
cue was given.

"There's a big house out in front," whispered Mally. "Ah! there's your
cue now."

Out in the center of the stage stood a young man, exclaiming eagerly, as
he looked in their direction:

"Ah, here comes the little society belle now!"

"Go on; walk right out on the stage," whispered Mally, giving Jessie a
push.

Jessie never knew how she got there.

The glare of the foot-lights blinded her. The words her companion
uttered fell upon dazed ears. She tried to speak the words that she had
learned so perfectly, but they seemed to die away in her throat; no
sound could she utter. A great numbness was clutching at her
heart-strings, and she could move neither hand nor foot.

"Aha! our little beauty is stage-frightened," she heard Celey Dunbar
whisper from one of the wings of the stage, in a loud, triumphant voice.
"I am just glad of it. That's what Manager Morgan gets by bringing in a
novice. Ha! ha! ha!"

Those words stung Jessie into action, and quick as a flash the truant
lines recurred to her, and to the great chagrin of her rival in the
wings, she went on with her part unfalteringly to the very end.

Her beauty, and her fresh, sweet simplicity and naturalness quite took
the audience by storm, and the curtain was rung down at length amid the
wildest storm of applause that that theater had ever known.

The manager was delighted with Jessie Bain's success. The ladies of the
company were furious, and they gathered together in one of the entrances
and watched her.

"Stage life is coming to a pretty how-de-do," cried one, furiously,
"when women who have been before the foot-lights for ten years--ay,
given the best years of their lives to the stage--have to stand aside,
for a novice like that!"

"My husband plays altogether too ardent a lover to her!" cried Dovie
Davis, jealously. "I won't stand it! Either she leaves this company at
th