Take the back drawing-room for the stage, and take me for the audience.

Tingle goes the bell; up runs the curtain; order in the gallery, silence in the pit--enter Lucy!" She tried hard to control herself; she forced back the sorrow--the innocent, natural, human sorrow for the absent and the dead--pleading hard with her for the tears that she refused.

Resolutely, with cold, clinched hands, she tried to begin.

As the first familiar words passed her lips, Frank came back to her from the sea, and the face of her dead father looked at her with the smile of happy old times.

The voices of her mother and her sister talked gently in the fragrant country stillness, and the garden-walks at Combe-Raven opened once more on her view.