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 practisings. 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 the cords run more quickly then. She was getting tired, they
said; the curtain had been up too long. Be that as it might, nothing
could persuade Susan Josselyn to sit again, and "Consolation" could
not be repeated.

So then came "Mother Hubbard and her dog,"--the slow old lady and the
knowing beast that was always getting one step ahead of her. The
possibility had occurred to Leslie Goldthwaite as she and Dakie Thayne
amused themselves one day with Captain Green's sagacious Sir Charles
Grandison, a handsome black spaniel, whose trained accomplishment was
to hold himself patiently in any posture in which he might be placed,
until the word of release was given. You might stand him on his hind