She dashed into the crude and sketchy character bold strokes of
Nature and illuminative gleams of genius, all her own.

Mr. Bury, as Osmyn, was cold and unsympathetic, avoided the eye of Zara,
and was even more tender than was "set down in the book" to Almeria.

"How well he acts his part!" said to herself the generous Zelma.

"How anxiety for his wife dashes his spirit!" said the charitable
audience.

At the close of this act the manager grasped Zelma's hand, and spoke of
her success as certain. She thanked him with an absent air, and gazed
about her wistfully. Surely her husband should have been the first to
give her joy. But he did not come forward. She shrank away to her
dressing-room, and waited for him vainly till she knew he was on the
stage, where she next met him in the great prison-scene.

In this scene, some bitterness of feeling--the first sharp pangs of
jealousy--gave, unconsciously to herself, a terrible vitality and
reality to her acting. She filled the stage with the electrical
atmosphere of her genius. Waxen Almeria, who was to have gone out as she
entered, received a shock of it, and stood for a moment transfixed. Even
Osmyn kindled out of his stony coldness, and gazed with awe and
irrepressible admiration at this new revelation of that strange,
profound creature he had called "wife." She, so late a shy woodland
nymph, stealing to his embrace,--now an angered goddess, blazing before
him, calling down upon him the lightnings of Olympus, with all the world
to see him shrink and shrivel into nothingness! And all this power and
passion, overtopping his utmost reach of art, outsoaring his wildest
aspirations, he had wooed, fondled, and protected! At first he was
overwhelmed with amazement; he could hardly have been more so, had a
volcano broken out through his hearth-stone; but soon, under the fierce
storm of Zara's taunts and reproaches, a sullen rage took possession of
him. He could not separate the actress from the wife,--and the wife
seemed in open, disloyal revolt. Every burst of applause from the
audience was an insult to him; and he felt a mad desire to oppose, to
defy them all, to assert a master's right over that frenzied woman, to
grasp her by the arm and drag her from the stage before their eyes!

This scene closes with a memorable speech:--

"Vile and ingrate! too late thou shalt repent
The base injustice thou hast done my love!
Ay, thou shalt know, spite of thy past distress