features like a torch. The King, the Queen!

Just at this moment, his Majesty was in gracious converse with a lady on
his right, a foreign princess, of an ancient, unpronounceable title,--a
thin, colorless head and form, overloaded with immemorial
family-jewels,--a mere frame of a woman, to hang brilliants upon. She
was one shine and shiver of diamonds, from head to foot;--she palpitated
light, like a glow-worm. Her Majesty, meanwhile, was regaling herself
from a jewelled snuff-box, and talking affably over her shoulder to her
favorite mistress of the robes, the fearful Schwellenberg.

But Zelma, looking through the transfiguring atmosphere of loyalty,
beheld the royal group encompassed by all the ideal splendor and
sacredness of majesty;--over their very commonplace heads towered the
airy crowns of a hundred regal ancestors, piled round on round, and
glimmering away into the clouds.

Ere she turned her fascinated eyes away from the august sight, her cue
was given. She started, and struggled to speak, but her lips clung
together. There was a dull roar and whirl in her brain, as of a vortex
of waters. In piteous appealing she looked into the face of her husband,
and caught on his lips a strange, faint smile of mingled pity and
exultation. It stung her like a lash! Instantly she was herself, or
rather Zara, a captive, but every inch a queen, and delivered herself
calmly and proudly, though with a little tremble of her past agitation
in her voice,--a thrill of womanly feeling, which felt its way at once
to the hearts of her audience.

The first act, however, afforded her so little scope for acting, that
she left the stage unassured of her own success. There was doubt before
and behind the curtain. The critics had given no certain sign,--the
general applause might have been merely an involuntary tribute to youth
and beauty. Actors and actresses hung back,--even the friendly manager
was guarded in his congratulations. But in the second act the
_debutante_ put an end to this dubious state of things,--at least, so
far as her audience was concerned. "The Captive Queen" took captive all,
save that stern row of critics,--the indomitable, the incorruptible.
Their awful judgment still hung suspended over her head.

In a scene with Osmyn Zelma first revealed her tragic power. In her
fitful tenderness, in the passionate reproaches which she stormed upon
him, in her entreaties and imprecations, she was the poet's ideal, and
more.