ng to attend their evening performance, bade
them adieu.

III.

The performances were more meagrely attended this evening than even on
the preceding one, but had they been conducted in the royal theatre of
a capital, they could not have been more elaborate, nor the troupe have
exerted themselves with greater order and effect. It mattered not a jot
to them whether their benches were thronged or vacant; the only audience
for whom the Baroni family cared was the foreign manager, young,
generous, and speculative, whom they had evidently without intention
already pleased, and whose good opinion they resolved to-night entirely
to secure. And in this they perfectly succeeded. Josephine was a tragic
muse; all of them, even to little Carlotta, performed as if their
destiny depended on the die. Baroni would not permit the children's
box to be carried round to-night, as he thought it an unfair tax on the
generous stranger, whom he did not the less please by this well-bred
abstinence. As for the mediaeval and historic groups, Sidonia could
recall nothing equal to them; and what surprised him most was the effect
produced by such miserable materials. It seemed that the whole was
effected with some stiffened linen and paper; but the divine touch of
art turned everything to gold. One statue of Henri IV. with his flowing
plume, and his rich romantic dress, was quite striking. It was the very
plume that had won at Ivry, and yet was nothing more than a sheet of
paper cut and twisted by the plastic finger of little Alfred.

There was to be no performance on the morrow; the niggard patronage of
the town had been exhausted. Indeed, had it not been for Sidonia, the
little domestic troupe would, ere this, have quitted the sullen town,
where they had laboured so finely, and achieved such an ungracious
return. On the morrow Baroni was to ride one of the fat horses over to
Berg, a neighbouring town of some importance, where there was even a
little theatre to be engaged, and if he obtained the permission of the
mayor, and could make fair terms, he proposed to give there a series
of representations. The mother was to stay at home and take care of the
grandmother; but the children, all the children, were to have a holiday,
and to dine with Sidonia at his hotel.

It would have been quite impossible for the most respectable burgher,
even of the grand place of a Flemish city, to have sent his children on
a visit in trim more neat, proper, and dec