That Gray Leighton had so carefully trained her in voice, gesture, manner, expression, having the most responsive ground to work upon, she was so well drilled in Shakespeare, Sheridan, Molière, Racine—in fact, in the brilliant actor’s splendid repertoire—that personal experience was the one thing lacking to develop her splendid powers.
She knew now that Keene and Leighton had been friends united by the closest sympathy.
The older man lacked the younger’s sustaining power, which at five-and-twenty—his age when Leighton left England—was not at its full zenith of course.
Leighton had at once perceived his young rival’s strength, and knew that his own fame would never be so lasting.
The critics had condemned a too great enthusiasm in him, alleging that his excitable nature led him to expend himself too soon in a play; that, in consequence, his finale was apt to be lacking in the interest felt by his audience in the early part of the evening.
Keene had felt the greatest admiration, however, for him, and he had spoken to Muriel as he had thought from the first, his own modesty underrating his own capabilities.
As a manager he knew that he himself had no living equal.
Sparing no pains, care, nor expense, he searched the world’s most remote corners for unique talent and objets d’art, so that he never incurred the mortification of reading that his productions were “one-act plays.”
All the minor rôles were as carefully rehearsed as his own, and the actors in his cast, even the very servants, received the most tempting offers and larger salaries than were usually paid—by outside men as inducement to leave the “Coliseum.”
“Are you ready, Miss Winstanley?” asked the novelist, as Mrs. Carroll left the room. “I don’t mind if you stop me twenty times; but for Heaven’s sake don’t go on too fast and get muddled. I have only notes here, you know. Where did we leave off?”