lover were invested throughout with
sufficient dramatic meaning to keep up the thread of the play. But it was
not the dramatic aspect of the scene for which the audience cared, it was
simply for the display which it made possible of Isabel Bretherton's
youth and grace and loveliness. They hung upon her every movement, and
Kendal found himself following her with the same eagerness of eye as
those about him, lest any phase of that embodied poetry should escape
him.

In this introductory scene, the elements which went to make up the spell
she exercised over her audience were perfectly distinguishable. Kendal's
explanation of it to himself was that it was based upon an exceptional
natural endowment of physical perfection, informed and spiritualised by
certain moral qualities, by simplicity, frankness, truth of nature. There
was a kind of effluence of youth, of purity, of strength, about her which
it was impossible not to feel, and which evidently roused the
enthusiastic sympathy of the great majority of those who saw her.

Forbes was sitting in the front of the box with Mrs. Stuart, his shaggy
gray head and keen lined face attracting considerable attention in their
neighbourhood. He was in his most expansive mood; the combativeness of an
hour before had disappeared, and the ardent susceptible temperament of
the man was absorbed in admiration, in the mere sensuous artist's delight
in a stirring and beautiful series of impressions. When the white dress
disappeared through the doorway of the ballroom, he followed it with a
sigh of regret, and during the scene which followed between the Prince
and his intended bride, he hardly looked at the stage. The Princess,
indeed, was all that Mrs. Stuart had pronounced her to be; she was
stiffer and clumsier than even her Teutonic _role_ could justify, and she
marched laboriously through her very proper and virtuous speeches,
evidently driven on by an uneasy consciousness that the audience was only
eager to come to the end of them and of her.

In the little pause which followed the disappearance of the
newly-betrothed pair into the distant ballroom, Mrs. Stuart leant
backward over her chair and said to Kendal:

'Now then, Mr. Kendal, prepare your criticisms! In the scene which is
just coming Miss Bretherton has a good deal more to do than to look
pretty!'

'Oh, but you forget our compact!' said Kendal. 'Remember you are to be
the judge of our behaviour at the end. It is not the part