Countess Hilda, disguised as the traditional phantom of the
Hohenzollerns, whose appearance bodes misfortune and death to those who
behold it, throws herself across the path of her rival in the hope of
driving her and those interested in her by sheer force of terror from the
castle and from Berlin, had been poetically conceived, and it furnished
Miss Bretherton with an admirable opportunity. As the White Lady, gliding
between rows of armed and spectral figures on either hand, and startling
the Princess and her companion by her sudden apparition in a gleam of
moonlight across the floor, she was once more the representative of all
that is most poetical and romantic in physical beauty. Nay, more than
this; as she flung her white arms above her head, or pointed to the
shrinking and fainting figure of her rival while she uttered her wailing
traditional prophecy of woe, her whole personality seemed to be invested
with a dramatic force of which there had been no trace in the long and
violent scene with the Prince. It was as though she was in some sort
capable of expressing herself in action and movement, while in all the
arts of speech she was a mere crude novice. At any rate, there could be
no doubt that in this one scene she realised the utmost limits of the
author's ideal, and when she faded into the darkness beyond the moonlight
in which she had first appeared, the house, which had been breathlessly
silent during the progress of the apparition, burst into a roar of
applause, in which Wallace and Kendal heartily joined.

'Exquisite!' said Kendal in Mrs. Stuart's ear, as he stood behind her
chair. 'She was romance itself! Her acting should always be a kind of
glorified and poetical pantomime; she would be inimitable so.'

Mrs. Stuart looked up and smiled agreement. 'Yes, that scene lives with
one. If everything else in the play is poor, she is worth seeing for that
alone. _Remember it_!'