“Very well, I think,” answered Bertram, a little hesitatingly. “We've had so many, many interruptions, though, that it is surprising how slow it is moving. In the first place, Miss Winthrop is gone more than half the time (she goes again to-morrow for a week!), and in this portrait I'm not painting a stroke without my model before me. I mean to take no chances, you see; and Miss Winthrop is perfectly willing to give me all the sittings I wish for. Of course, if she hadn't changed the pose and costume so many times, it would have been done long ago--and she knows it.” “Of course--she knows it,” murmured Billy, a little faintly, but with a peculiar intonation in her voice. “And so you see,” sighed Bertram, “what the twentieth of March is going to mean for me.” “It's going to mean a splendid triumph!” asserted Billy; and this time her voice was not faint, and it carried only a ring of loyal confidence. “You blessed comforter!” murmured Bertram, giving with his eyes the caress that his lips would so much have preferred to give--under more propitious circumstances. CHAPTER XXV. THE OPERETTA The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth of February were, for Billy, and for all concerned in the success of the operetta, days of hurry, worry, and feverish excitement, as was to be expected, of course. Each afternoon and every evening saw rehearsals in whole, or in parts. A friend of the Club-president's sister-in-law-a woman whose husband was stage manager of a Boston theatre--had consented to come and “coach” the performers. At her appearance the performers--promptly thrown into nervous spasms by this fearsome nearness to the “real thing”--forgot half their cues, and conducted themselves generally like frightened school children on “piece day,” much to their own and every one else's despair. Then, on the evening of the nineteenth, came the final dress rehearsal on the stage of the pretty little hall that had been engaged for the performance of the operetta. The dress rehearsal, like most of its kind, was, for every one, nothing but a nightmare of discord, discouragement, and disaster. Everybody's nerves were on edge, everybody was sure the thing would be a “flat failure.” The soprano sang off the key, the alto forgot to shriek “Beware, beware!” until it was so late there was nothing to beware of; the basso stepped on Billy's trailing frock and tore it; even the tenor, Arkwright himself, seemed to have lost every bit of vim from his acting. The chorus sang “Oh, be joyful!” with dirge-like solemnity, and danced as if legs and feet were made of wood. The lovers, after the fashion of amateur actors from time immemorial, “made love like sticks.”