The temperature of the audience was rising to Blood Heat--but the national sense of fair play was not boiled out of them yet.
In the midst of the demonstration, Magdalen quietly made her first entrance, as "Julia." She was dressed very plainly in dark colors, and wore her own hair; all stage adjuncts and alterations (excepting the slightest possible touch of rouge on her cheeks) having been kept in reserve to disguise her the more effectually in her second part.

The grace and simplicity of her costume, the steady self-possession with which she looked out over the eager rows of faces before her, raised a low hum of approval and expectation.

She spoke--after suppressing a momentary tremor--with a quiet distinctness of utterance which reached all ears, and which at once confirmed the favorable impression that her appearance had produced.

The one member of the audience who looked at her and listened to her coldly, was her elder sister.

Before the actress of the evening had been five minutes on the stage, Norah detected, to her own indescribable astonishment, that Magdalen had audaciously individualized the feeble amiability of "Julia's" character, by seizing no less a person than herself as the model to act it by.