small value) had been retained
in payment for expenses of illness and burial; his private papers were
at the disposal of the widow. Deceased had been buried in the parish
church-yard of Walton. This was all.

Zelma had abruptly dismissed her maid, that she might read quite
unobserved a letter which she suspected brought news from her husband;
so she was quite alone throughout that fearful night. What fierce,
face-to-face wrestlings with grief and remorse were hers! What sweet,
torturing memories of love, of estrangement, of loss! What visions of
_him_, torn with the agonies, wild with the terrors of death, calling
her name in vain imploring or with angry imprecations!--of him, so
young, so sinful, dragged struggling toward the abyss of mystery and
night, wrenched, as it were, out of life, with all its passions hot at
his heart!

Hour after hour she sat at her table, grasping the fatal letter, still
as death, and all but as cold. She yet wore the last dress of Belvedera,
and was half enveloped by the black cloud of her dishevelled hair; but
the simulated frenzy, which so late had drawn shuddering sighs from a
thousand hearts, was succeeded by a silent, stony despair, infinitely
more terrible. A sense of hopeless desolation and abandonment settled
upon her soul; the distances of universes seemed to separate her from
the dead. But to this suddenly succeeded a chill, awful sense of a
presence, wrapped in silence and mystery, melting through all material
barriers, treading on the impalpable air, not "looking ancient kindness
on her pain," but lowering amid the shadows of her chamber, stern,
perturbed, unreconciled. All these lonely horrors, these wild griefs,
unrelieved by human sympathy or companionship, by even the unconscious
comfort which flows in the breathing of a near sleeper, crowded and
pressed upon her brain, and seemed to touch her veins with frost and
fire.

For long weeks, Zelma lay ill, with a slow, baffling fever. Her mind,
torn from its moorings, went wandering, wandering, over a vast sea of
troubled dreams,--now creeping on through weary stretches of calm, now
plunging into the heart of tempests and tossed upon mountainous surges,
now touching momently at islands of light, now wrecked upon black,
desert shores.

All was strange, vague, and terrible, at first; but gradually there
stole back upon her her own life of womanhood and Art,--its scenes and
changes, its struggles, temptations, and triumphs, its