l at last he was regarded only as the husband of the
popular actress,--then, merely tolerated for her sake. He fell, or
rather flung himself, into a life of reckless dissipation and
profligacy, and sunk so low that he scrupled not to accept from his
wife, and squander on base pleasures, money won by the genius for which
he hated her. Many were the nights when Zelma returned from the
playhouse to her cheerless lodgings, exhausted, dispirited, and alone,
to walk her chamber till the morning, wrestling with real terrors and
sorrows, the homely distresses of the heart, hard, absolute,
unrelieved,--to which the tragic agonies she had been representing
seemed but child's play.

At length, finding himself at the lowest ebb of theatrical favor, and
hating horribly the scene of his humiliating defeat, Mr. Bury resolved
to return to his old strolling life in the provinces. Making at the same
moment the first announcement of his going and his hurried adieux to
Zelma, who heard his last cold words in dumb dismay, with little show of
emotion, but with heavy grief and dread presentiments at her heart, he
departed. He was accompanied by the fair actress with whom he played
first parts at Arden,--but now, green-room gossip said, not in a merely
professional association. This story was brought to Zelma; but her
bitter cup was full without it. With a noble blindness, the fanaticism
of wifely faith, she rejected it utterly. "He is weak, misguided, mad,"
she said, "but not so basely false as that. He must run his wild,
wretched course awhile longer,--it seems necessary for him; but he will
return at last,--surely he will,--sorrowful, repentant, 'in his right
mind,' himself and mine once more. He cannot weary out God's patience
and my love."

After the first shock of her desertion was past, Zelma was conscious of
a sense of relief from a weight of daily recurring care and humiliation,
the torture of an unloving presence, chill and ungenial as arctic
sunlight. Even in the cold blank of his absence there was something
grateful to her bruised heart, like the balm of darkness to suffering
eyes. Her art was now all in all to her,--the strong-winged passion,
which lifted her out of herself and her sorrows. She was studying Juliet
for the first time. She had been playing for more than a year before she
could be prevailed upon to attempt a Shakspearian character, restrained
by a profound modesty from exercising her crude powers upon one of those