"And it's really a very important part, and the very first solo," chuckled Irene. "Else why did Professor Trask take it himself?" "If it's so important," put in Sissy, grasping at a straw, "you'd better take it yourself. Why must I always take a man's part? And I can't sing, anyway." "Why, Sissy!" Split's tone was flattery incarnate, but the irony in her eye made her junior dance. "You know I can't," she sniffled. "But my voice and Split's go so well together in the Rose and Lily duet," said Kate, putting the book of the cantata upon the piano-rack and opening it persuasively. "You promise me every time," wailed the downtrodden Recluse, reluctantly moving forward, "that I won't have to be it the next time." "Well, you won't next time," said Kate, generously. "Will she, Split?" "Well, I won't sing it this time," declared Sissy, seating herself at the piano, yet making a last stand at the very guns. But Kate and Irene burst forth in the opening chorus with all the verve in the world. The Madigans never scorned expression when it was understood that they were acting. And the twins, still pulling stage properties out of the box, and even Frances, fantastically decorated with a torn Irish lace fichu over the bifurcated, footed white garment she still wore o' nights, joined joyfully in: "'We are the flowers, The fair young flowers, That come at the voice of spring--' DING--DONG!" It was a familiar old Madigan joke, always greeted with a shriek of laughter, to shout out the two notes of the accompaniment that punctuated the musical phrases. Its observance now put even Sissy in good humor, so that when the time came for the Recluse to make his appearance, she left the piano, and stalking miserably about with the preliminary cough with which the unfortunate Professor Trask was afflicted, she sang her doleful recitative. The Madigans were never literalists. They were of the impressionistic school, which requires of the audience, as well as of the artist, high imaginative powers. And here the audience of one moment was the actor of the next, whose duty it was not to mind too closely the letter that killeth, but to mimic irreverently, to exaggerate, to make of themselves caricatures of the mannerisms of others, to nickname, to seize upon every peculiarity with their quick, observant, cruel young eyes and paint it in flesh-and-blood cartoons. Thus, when the Rose, that "gentle flower in which a thorn is oft concealed," sang her duet with the Nightingale (Sissy trilling weakly on the piano, while Frank fluted her fingers affectedly as she had seen it done that memorable night) it was done in the hollow, throaty tones of the elder Miss Blind-Staggers, who had created the role; while the Lily sang through her nose, which she wiped every now and then in a manner unmistakably that of Henrietta Blind-Staggers.