. Something like an odd, knowing smile
twinkling out from the glow also, as he looked up at Scherman and took
his orders. All this while he had said nothing.

Leonard Brookhouse made his little speech, received with applause and a
cheer. Then they quieted down behind the scenes, and a rustle and buzz
began in front,--kept up for five minutes or so, in gentle fashion, till
two gentlemen, in plain clothes, walked quietly in at the open door; at
sight of whom, with instinctive certainty, the whole assembly rose.
Leslie Goldthwaite, peeping through the folds of the curtain, saw a
tall, grand-looking man, in what may be called the youth of middle age,
every inch a soldier, bowing as he was ushered forward to a seat vacated
for him, and followed by one younger, who modestly ignored the notice
intended for his chief. Dakie Thayne was making his way, with eyes
alight and excited, down a side passage to his post.

Then the two actors hurried once more into position; the stage was
cleared by a whispered peremptory order; the bell rung once, the tent
trembling with some one whisking further out of sight behind it,--twice,
and the curtain rose upon "Consolation."

Lovely as the picture is, it was lovelier in the living tableau. There
was something deep and intense in the pale calm of Susan Josselyn's
face, which they had not counted on even when they discovered that hers
was the very face for the "Sister." Something made you thrill at the
thought of what those eyes would show, if the downcast, quiet lids were
raised. The earnest gaze of the dying soldier met more, perhaps, in its
uplifting; for Frank Scherman had a look, in this instant of enacting,
that he had never got before in all his practicings. The picture was too
real for applause,--almost, it suddenly seemed, for representation.

"Don't I know that face, Noll?" General Ingleside asked, in a low tone,
of his companion.

Instead of answering at once, the younger man bent further forward
toward the stage, and his own very plain, broad, honest face, full over
against the downcast one of the Sister of Mercy, took upon itself that
force of magnetic expression which makes a look felt even across a
crowd of other glances, as if there were but one straight line of
vision, and that between such two. The curtain was going slowly down;
the veiling lids trembled, and the paleness replaced itself with a
slow-mounting flush of color over the features, still held motionless.
They let