“Surely I heard--,” continued Garrick, but suddenly checked himself. “Ah, I recollect now what I heard,” he resumed, in a low tone. “Alas! Peggy is a sad coquette, but I doubt not that the story of your conquests will ring through the town after to-night.” She did not seem to hear him. Her eyes were fixed upon Peggy Woffington, and in another moment the signal came that the curtain was ready to rise. Garrick and Macklin went on the stage together, the former smiling in a self-satisfied way. “I think I have made it certain that she will startle the house in at least one scene,” he whispered to Macklin. “Ah, that is why Peggy is so boisterous,” said Macklin. “'Tis only when she is over-nervous that she becomes boisterous. Peggy is beginning to feel that she may have a rival.” But if Peggy was nervous she certainly did not suggest it by her acting. She had not many opportunities for displaying her comedy powers in the play, but she contrived to impart a few touches of humour to the love scenes in the first act, which brightened up the gloom of the tragedy, and raised the spirits of the audience in some measure. Her mature style contrasted very effectively with the efforts of Miss Hoppner, who showed herself to be excessively nervous, and thereby secured at once the sympathies of the house. It was doubtful which of the two obtained the larger share of applause. At the end of the act, Captain Joycelyn was waiting at the back of the stage to compliment Peggy upon her acting. Miss Hoppner brushed past them on her way to her dressing-room, without deigning to recognise either. Curiously enough, in the next act the position of the two actresses seemed to be reversed. It was Mrs. Woffington who was nervous, whereas Miss Hoppner was thoroughly self-possessed. “What in the world has come over you, my dear?” asked Garrick, when Peggy had made an exit so rapidly as to cause the latter half of one of her lines to be quite inaudible. “God knows what it is!” said Peggy. “I have felt all through the act as if I were going to break down--as if I wanted to run away from an impending calamity. By heaven, sir, I feel as if the tragedy were real and not simulated!” “Psha! You are but a woman, after all,” said Garrick. “I fear that is the truth,” said she. “Good God! that woman seems to have changed places with me. She is speaking her lines as if she had been acting in London for years. She is doing what she pleases with the house.”