brief joy and
long sorrow, all shaken and confused together, but still familiar. Now
the faces of her audiences seemed to throng upon her, packing her room
from floor to ceiling, darkening the light, sucking up all the air, and
again piercing her through and through with their cold, merciless gaze.
Now the characters she had personated grouped themselves around her bed,
all distinct, yet duplicates and multiplications of herself, mocking her
with her own voice, and glaring at her with her own eyes. Now pleasant
summer-scenes at Burleigh Grange brightened the dull walls, and a memory
of the long lane in the white prime of its hawthorn bloom flowed like a
river of fragrance through her chamber. Then there strode in upon her a
form of beauty and terror, and held her by the passion and gloom of his
eye,--and with him crept in a chill and heavy air, like an exhalation
from the rank turf of neglected graves.

* * * * *

Zelma recovered from this illness, if it could be called a recovery, to
a state of only tolerable physical health, and a condition of pitiable
mental apathy and languor. She turned with a half-weary, half-petulant
distaste from her former pursuits and pleasures, and abandoned her
profession with a sort of terror,--feeling that its mockery of sorrows,
such as had fallen so crushingly on her unchastened heart, would madden
her utterly. But neither could she endure again the constraint and
conventionalities of English private life; she had died to her art, and
she glided, like a phantom, out of her country, and out of the thoughts
of the public, in whose breath she had lived, for whose pleasure she had
toiled, often from the hidden force of her own sorrows, the elements of
all tragedy seething in her secret heart.

Year after year she lived a wandering, out-of-the-way life on the
Continent. It was said that she went to Spain, sought out her mother's
wild kindred, and dwelt with them, making their life her life, their
ways her ways, shrinking neither from sun-glare nor tempest, privation
nor peril. But, at length, tired of wandering and satiated with
adventure, she flung off the Zincala, returned to England, and even
returned, forsworn, to her art, as all do, or long to do, who have once
embraced it from a genuine passion.

She made no effort to obtain an engagement at Covent Garden; for her,
that stage was haunted by a presence more gloomy than Hamlet, more
dreadful than the Gh