At which public allusion to her arithmetical powers, Lady Elsabina took refuge in another sniff, followed by a haughty silence.
******
The rehearsal was not an unqualified success. The heroine, as is the way of heroines, got out of bed the wrong side. After a stirring domestic scene, during which she bit her nurse and flung a basin of bread and milk upon the floor, she arrived tearful and indignant and half an hour late at the rehearsal.
"Can't you come a bit later?" said the stage-manager bitterly.
"If you're going to be nasty to me," returned the heroine stormily, "I'm going back home."
"All right," muttered the stage-manager, cowed, like most stage-managers, by the threatening of tears.
The first item on the agenda was the question of the wardrobe. William had received an unpleasant surprise which considerably lowered his faith in human nature generally. On paying a quiet and entirely informal visit to his sister's bedroom in her absence, to collect some articles of festive female attire for his heroine, he had found every drawer, and even the wardrobe, locked. His sister had kept herself informed of the date of the performance, and had taken measures accordingly. He had collected only a crochet-edged towel, one of the short lace curtains from the window, and a drawn-thread work toilet-cover. Otherwise his search was barren. Passing through the kitchen, however, he found one of her silk petticoats on a clothes-horse and added it to his plunder. He found various other articles in other parts of the house. The dressing up took place in an outhouse that had once been a stable at the back of William's house. The heroine's dress consisted of Ethel's silk petticoat with holes cut for the arms. The lace curtain formed an effective head-dress, and the toilet-cover pinned on to the end of the petticoat made a handsome train.
The effect was completed by the crochet-edged towel pinned round her waist. Sir Rufus Archibald Green, swathed in an Indian embroidered table-cover, with a black satin cushion pinned on to his chest, a tea-cosy on his head, and an umbrella in his hand, looked a princely hero. The Hon. Lord Leopold wore the dining-room table-cloth and the morning-room waste-paper basket with a feather, forcibly wrested from the cock's tail by William, protruding jauntily from the middle. Douglas, as the crowd, was simply attired in William's father's top hat and a mackintosh.
William had quietly abstracted the top hat as soon as he heard definitely that his father would not be present at the performance. William's father was to preside at a political meeting in the village hall, which was to be addressed by a Great Man from the Cabinet, who was coming down from London specially for the occasion.
"Vast as are the attractions of any enterprise promoted by you, William," he had said, politely at breakfast, "duty calls me elsewhere."