"Well, she looks like a very pretty girl...."
"And besides that?"
"Besides that she looks very much like our own girls; it is really a most extraordinary freak of nature! She seems to be very presentable on further acquaintance; Princess Vulpini is quite in love with her."
"Indeed!--Well, Barillat is possessed with the idea of having her to play the part of Lady Jane Grey and in Heaven's name let him have his own way!" cried the countess. "If Marie Vulpini will bring her here I will make the best of it."
"What, you mean to say that you will let her figure in your tableau and not invite her mother?" laughed Sempaly.
"Invite her!--to the performance of course. I invite Tom, Dick, and Harry, and all the English parsons and all the foreign artists."
"And all their families. Fritzi, you are an admirable woman!" retorted Sempaly ironically.
"But the rehearsals are so perfectly intimate," she murmured. Time pressed however. "Well, have it so for all I care;" said the countess resignedly and next morning she paid a polite call on the Baroness Sterzl to request Zinka's assistance; and as she had as much tact as pride she had soon reconciled not only Zinka, but her sensitive thin-skinned brother, to the fact that the young girl had only been asked at the last moment and under the pressure of necessity to take part in the performance. Cecil did not altogether like the idea of displaying his pretty sister in a tableau and only consented because he did not like to deprive Zinka of the pleasure which she looked forward to with great delight. He adored the child and could refuse her nothing.
The evening of the festival arrived; the performances took place in a vast room almost lined with mirrors and lighted by wonderful Venetian chandeliers that hung from the decorated ceiling where frescoes were framed in tasteless gilt scroll work. In spite of its size the room was crowded; the most illustrious of the company sat in solitary dignity in the front row, and behind them was packed a fashionable but somewhat mixed crowd. Manly forms of consummate elegance were squeezed against the walls, and the assembly sparkled like a sea of sheeny silks and glittering jewels. Princess Vulpini, who was helping the countess to do the honors, hovered on the margin, graceful and kindly, but a little pale and tired, and the countess herself reigned supreme in that regal dignity which she could so becomingly assume on fitting occasions. There were very few women who could wear a diamond coronet with such good grace as Fritzi Ilsenbergh--even her intractable cousin Sempaly did her that much justice.
The great success of the evening was not the little French play, in which Madame de Gandry and the all-accomplished Barillat made and parried their hits after the accepted methods of the Théatre Français; it was not the operetta, in which Mrs. Ferguson looked bewitchingly pretty and sang 'le Sentier convert' to admiration; it was not even the children's tableau, in which the little Vulpinis looked like a bunch of freshly-gathered roses; the great success of the evening was the tableau of Lady Jane Grey. Sterzl's face in this scene was a perfect tragedy, all the misery of an executioner who adores his victim was legible there. And Zinka!--gazing up to heaven with ecstatic pathos, her whole attitude expressive of sacred resignation and childlike awe, she was the very embodiment of the hapless and innocent being before whom the executioner lowers his gaze. A string quartet played the allegretto from Beethoven's seventh symphony and the melancholy music heightened the effect of the poetical tableau, thrilling the audience like a lullaby sung by angels to soothe the struggling, suffering human soul.