Cabs, carriages, electric broughams, even the motor-cars, arrived in quick succession before the brightly lighted vestibule of one of the prettiest theatres in London. From these emerged women in blazing evening dress, men who had dined, and men capricious and irritable because they had not dined--young girls to whom all plays were a dream of delight, mere boys who already had voted the whole thing "rot." As for the critics, they were chiefly patrons of hansoms; though a few arrived on foot, two and two, each trying to learn what the other would say about a performance which many had witnessed at a dress rehearsal. Short men and tall men, bearded men and bald men, they cared nothing for the success of the play, but everything for the glory of the notices they must write. An historical drama could not fail to give them a fine opening. They lolled back easily in their stalls as men whose literary knives were for the moment sheathed, but would be busy anon. The theatre was packed to the very ceiling when the curtain rose, and few of the amiable first-nighters were missing from the audience. Famous lawyers, doctors of letters, and doctors of medicine, editors of illustrated papers and editors of papers that were not illustrated, literary ladies and ladies who were not literary, novelists, essayists, poets, that curious quasi-Bohemian crowd which constitutes a London first-night house, stood for most of the arts and many of the sciences of our day; and yet in the main brought a child's heart to the play as Bohemian crowds will. The cynics of eighteen, mostly representing halfpenny evening papers, were among the few who denounced the drama before they had seen it. "'Haddon Hall' on the stage again--why," said they, "there have been twenty Di Vernons in our time and why should this Di Vernon find mercy?" She was already in the coach of failure so far as they were concerned. The curtain rose upon their mutterings and did not still them. It was a pretty scene, the park of famous Haddon Hall and the meeting between pretty Dorothy Vernon and her young lover beneath the sheltering yews. The unknown _débutante_, Etta Romney, received a lukewarm welcome from the audience; but all admitted the grace of her attitudes, the charm of her voice, and the earnestness she brought to her assistance. A little amateurish in the earlier moments of the play she warmed to her work anon; and a love scene which would have been ridiculous had it been ill-played, she lifted by natural talent to a pinnacle at least of toleration. So the curtain fell to some applause; and the great impressario, Mr. Charles Izard, again ventured the opinion that she was "bully," though his voice had not that confident ring it possessed at the dinner-table. Could the girl make a failure of it, after all? It was just possible. And undoubtedly the play was not a masterpiece.