In an instant the horrified Mademoiselle Vivier was treated to an appalling spectacle. All of her charges utterly forgetting their manners or even decency, were stooping double, their full starched skirts sticking out at acute angles behind, and to the tune of muffled shrieks of laughter were dangling and shaking their heads, like so many lunatics, their carefully dressed hair sweeping the floor. She rushed at the nearest one, Marise Allen, and forced her back to an upright position. But this did not improve things. When Marise caught a glimpse of the others, like great white mushrooms, stooping and shaking, she burst out into anything but a muffled shout of laughter, which brought them all up, one after another, to gaze and scream, and lean, convulsed and hysterical, against the walls. It was a critical moment. The curtain was due to go up, and the girls were really out of hand. Mademoiselle Vivier could do nothing with them. They had lost control of themselves; her experienced eye knew the signs. In a moment more, one of the more high-strung ones would begin to cry and then.... Good God! what a mess! What diabolically infernal creatures girls were to handle! How sick she was of their imbecility! She ran hastily around to the side door and beckoning in the Mother Superior told her what was happening. The nun nodded understandingly, meditated for an instant, casting about in her mind, and then, her aged face taking on an expression of majestic calm, she swept back to the little room behind the stage. The girls were startled to see her and alarmed by the intense gravity of her face. "My children," she said quietly in the clear, gentle, masterful voice which had kept the Community in whole-hearted subservience to her for thirty years, "my children." She bent her wasted old face on them, raising one thin white hand, peremptorily. Her long flowing black sleeve gave a commanding amplitude to this gesture. "My little children, lift up your hearts...." She waited an instant, till she held every eye, and then she said reverently, "My children, at every important moment of our lives we must turn to Our Very Holy Mother, to bless us. Before you go on the stage to-day, to represent your school in public, and to do honor to music, which God has blessed as an instrument of good, let us pray Our Mother to be with you, and guide you." She bowed her head. Hypnotically, all the young heads bowed with hers. She began in a low murmur, "Ave Maria, sancta tu in mulieribus...." All the young voices murmured with her, discharging in the reverenced words, the nervous tension of their excitement and frolic. When they finished, they were all quiet, with serious faces. The Mother Superior raised her hand over them, murmuring a short, inaudible prayer of her own. There was an instant's silence.