nful
that it would have seemed an evil omen to her to begin a new season with
it.'

'Was she wise, I wonder?'

'I think she did well to follow her fancy in the matter, and she herself
has had plenty of time. She was working at it all the weeks she was with
us, and young Harting, too, I think had notice enough. Some of the
smaller parts may go roughly to-night, but they will soon fall into
shape.'

'Poor Wallace!' said Kendal; 'he must be wishing it well over. I never
saw a house better stocked with critics.'

'Here he is,' cried Madame de Chateauvieux, betraying her suppressed
excitement in her nervous little start. 'Oh, Mr. Wallace, how do you do?
and how are things going?'

Poor Wallace threw himself into his seat, looking the picture of misery
so far as his face, which Nature had moulded in one of her cheerfullest
moods, was capable of it.

'My dear Madame de Chateauvieux, I have no more notion than the man in
the moon. Miss Bretherton is an angel, and without Forbes we should have
collapsed a hundred times already, and that's about all I know. As for
the other actors, I suppose they will get through their parts somehow,
but at present I feel like a man at the foot of the gallows. There goes
the hell; now for it.'

The sketch for the play of _Elvira_ had been found among the papers of a
young penniless Italian who had died, almost of starvation, in his Roman
garret, during those teeming years after 1830, when poets grew on every
hedge and the romantic passion was abroad. The sketch had appeared in a
little privately-printed volume which Edward Wallace had picked up by
chance on the Paris quays. He had read it in an idle hour in a railway,
had seen its capabilities, and had forthwith set to work to develop the
sketch into a play. But, in developing it, he had carefully preserved the
character of the original conception. It was a conception strictly of the
Romantic time, and the execution of it presented very little of that
variety of tone which modern audiences have learnt to expect. The play
told one rapid breathless story of love, jealousy, despair, and death,
and it told it directly and uninterruptedly, without any lighter
interludes. Author and adapter alike had trusted entirely to the tragic
force of the situation and the universality of the motives appealed to.
The diction of the piece was the diction of Alfred de Vigny or of the
school of Victor Hugo. It was, indeed, rather a dramatic love-poem than a