aments into my hair with nervous fingers.

"Do you know the cues?" she asked anxiously. "Oh, I hope you'll be able
to remember the part! The prompter is to stand behind the right wing, so
back that way if you feel in any danger of forgetting."

The girls were waxing impatient, to judge from the clapping, which we
could hear as we hurried down to the school-room.

"Is she ready?" said Doris. "Then draw up the curtain, and begin."

My head was in a whirl. It had all happened so quickly, that I had
scarcely time to realize what I was doing. One little thought came to me
as I walked on to the stage: "Perhaps Portia herself was equally anxious
and nervous as she watched her lover making the choice upon which all
her happiness depended", and I began "I pray you tarry, pause a day or
two", with an eagerness that fitted in well with the part. I needed no
prompting, the words seemed to come without any effort of memory. My
delight at Bassanio's success, my grief at Antonio's letter, and my
anxiety that they should go at once to his relief, were at the time only
the expression of my natural feelings. I was living in the part, and the
heroine's joys and sorrows were my own.

We were called before the curtain at the end of the performance, and
the audience broke into ringing cheers for Portia. I stood upon the
platform like one in a dream; my success and the shouting girls were
nothing to me, I saw only one face in the room, for there, by the
doorway, clapping and cheering louder than anyone else, her dear cheeks
flushed and her dark eyes shining with generous triumph was--Cathy!

"You did it on purpose!" I declared afterwards. "Cathy, I don't believe
you were ill at all!"

"Of course I wasn't!" she replied, laughing. "I wanted to give you a
chance to show them what you could do, and it seemed the only way
possible. I thought of it from the first, and that was why I went over
my part so often with you, and made you rehearse it with me. It was
splendid, Philippa, simply splendid! I couldn't have done it half so
well myself. Now the whole school knows that you can act, and even
Ernestine Salt can't deny you the right to become a member of the
Dramatic Society."

CHAPTER IX

A HARD TIME

"I have not that alacrity of spirit
Nor cheer of mind that I was wont to have."

Time seemed to pass very rapidly away, and I could scarcely realize it
when I found I had been more than a year at The Hollies. I was now a