ailed the overture and the commencing
scenas. An ominous buzz circulated round the house: the singers,
the orchestra,--electrically sensitive to the impression of the
audience,--grew, themselves, agitated and dismayed, and failed in the
energy and precision which could alone carry off the grotesqueness of
the music.

There are always in every theatre many rivals to a new author and a new
performer,--a party impotent while all goes well, but a dangerous ambush
the instant some accident throws into confusion the march of success. A
hiss arose; it was partial, it is true, but the significant silence of
all applause seemed to forebode the coming moment when the displeasure
would grow contagious. It was the breath that stirred the impending
avalanche. At that critical moment Viola, the Siren queen, emerged for
the first time from her ocean cave. As she came forward to the
lamps, the novelty of her situation, the chilling apathy of the
audience,--which even the sight of so singular a beauty did not at the
first arouse,--the whispers of the malignant singers on the stage, the
glare of the lights, and more--far more than the rest--that recent hiss,
which had reached her in her concealment, all froze up her faculties and
suspended her voice. And, instead of the grand invocation into which
she ought rapidly to have burst, the regal Siren, retransformed into
the trembling girl, stood pale and mute before the stern, cold array of
those countless eyes.

At that instant, and when consciousness itself seemed about to fail her,
as she turned a timid beseeching glance around the still multitude, she
perceived, in a box near the stage, a countenance which at once, and
like magic, produced on her mind an effect never to be analysed
nor forgotten. It was one that awakened an indistinct, haunting
reminiscence, as if she had seen it in those day-dreams she had been so
wont from infancy to indulge. She could not withdraw her gaze from that
face, and as she gazed, the awe and coldness that had before seized her,
vanished like a mist from before the sun.

In the dark splendour of the eyes that met her own there was indeed
so much of gentle encouragement, of benign and compassionate
admiration,--so much that warmed, and animated, and nerved,--that any
one, actor or orator, who has ever observed the effect that a single
earnest and kindly look in the crowd that is to be addressed and won,
will produce upon his mind, may readily account for the