r lovely voice told its sad tale
without losing any of its sweetness and beauty. The pathos of the little
souvenir phrases was almost unbearable, and the tragic power of the
finish was extraordinary in a voice of such rare distinction and fluid
utterance. Her singing and acting went hand in hand, twin sisters, equal
and indivisible, and when the great moment in the trio came, she stepped
forward and with an inspired intensity lifted her quivering hands above
her head in a sort of mad ecstasy, and sang out the note clear and true,
yet throbbing with emotion."

The paper slid from Evelyn's hand. She could see from Ulick's
description of her acting that she had acted very well; if she had not,
he could not have written like that. But her acting only seemed
extraordinary when she read about it. It was all so natural to her. She
simply went on the stage, and once she was on the stage she could not do
otherwise. She could not tell why she did things. Her acting was so much
a part of herself that she could not think of it as an art at all; it
was merely a medium through which she was able to re-live past phases of
her life, or to exhibit her present life in a more intense and
concentrated form. The dropping of the book was quite true; she had
dropped a piece of music when she first saw Owen, and the omission of
the scream was natural to her. She felt sure that she would not have
seen Mephistopheles just then; she would have been too busy thinking of
the young man. But she thought that she might take a little credit for
her entrance in the third act. Somehow her predecessors had not seen
that it was absurd to come smiling and tripping out of church, where she
had seen Mephistopheles. She read the lines describing her power to
depict madness. But even in the mad scenes she was not conscious of
having invented anything. She had had sensations of madness--she
supposed everyone had--and she threw herself into those sensations,
intensifying them, giving them more prominence on the stage than they
had had in her own personal life.

Many had thought her a greater actress than a singer; and she had been
advised to dispense with her voice and challenge a verdict on her
speaking voice in one of Shakespeare's plays. Owen would have liked her
to risk the adventure, but she dared not. It would seem a wanton insult
to her voice. She had imagined that it might leave her as an offended
spirit might leave its local habitation. Her Margaret had