lk of the audience had mistaken her
for Ramsey and had made her more and more a favorite at each brief
reappearance.

Fearful moment. Beyond sight only to the outer eye, the bishop, whom she
herself had pushed into the grapple of the pestilence, lay dead. Basile
was dying. Two of the Courteneys were plague stricken, and the third,
for whom she felt a special, inexplicable accountability, was, with
Gilmore and Watson, in constant mortal peril from her twin brothers, and
the twins therefore from them. Before her eyes, so near she could have
tossed a flower to her, was Phyllis, a spectre from an awful past, the
destroyer of the _Quakeress_, liable herself, within any hour, should
the truth be discovered, to be burned like a witch. There she was, "the
slave girl Phyllis," as the runaway advertisement would have had it, a
culprit, and a property no way superior, in popular regard, to the
blackest African, yet by Hayle blood so near of kin--kin! kin to
her!--that with no other aid than a few touches of paint and pencil she
was being enthusiastically acclaimed as Ramsey Hayle by an assemblage
which has just applauded her, Ramsey, in the blaze of those same
footlights. Fearful moment! that aged her as no earlier moment ever had;
yes, and for the instant, at least, threw into her face a maturity that
heightened the unhappy resemblance.

She stopped because her presence seemed about to precipitate a terrible
mischief, and she stood because flight would but leave that mischief to
do its worst. Through this glaring show of likeness she seemed to be in
the keenest danger of betraying back into slavery on the spot this poor,
intrepid "Harriet," identified as the Phyllis supposed these ten years
to be under the floods of the Mississippi. At that moment, on the stage,
in Ramsey's role of a housemaid, the role from which Ramsey bitterly
remembered she had been excused through Hugh Courteney's urging,
"Harriet" chanced to be acting a ludicrous dismay before a transient
dilemma in which, as in Ramsey's, staying threatened disaster yet good
faith said stay--Ramsey's own present actual case except that Harriet's
was comic. A hundred beholders laughed, and then turning and peering at
the dim, central figure of Ramsey suddenly redoubled the laugh and
presently redoubled it again.

Yet it yielded a certain relief. While there is mirth there is hope.
Even now the player of the part was recognized only as Mrs. Gilmore's
maid. Her resemblance