oods and
parks, the daisied swell of its downs refreshed and soothed her eye,
tired of striking forever against dull brick walls and struggling with
smoke and fog.

Then May came round,--the haunted month of all the year for her. The
hawthorn-hedges burst into flower,--the high-ways and by-paths and lanes
became Milky Ways of bloom, and all England was once more veined with
fragrance.

They were in the North, when one morning Zelma was startled by hearing
the manager say that the next night they should play at Walton. It was
there that Lawrence Bury died; it was there he slept, in the stranger's
unvisited grave. She would seek out that grave and sink on it, as on the
breast of one beloved, though long estranged. It would cool the dull,
ceaseless fever of her heart to press it against the cold mound, and to
whisper into the rank grass her faithful remembrance, her forgiveness,
her unconquerable love.

But it was late when the players reached Walton; and, after the
necessary arrangements for the evening were concluded, Zelma found that
she had no time for a pilgrimage to the parish churchyard. She could see
it from a window of her lodgings;--it was high-walled, dark and damp,
crowded with quaint, mossy tomb-stones, and brooded over by immemorial
yews. In the deepening, misty twilight, there was something awful in the
spot. It was easy to fancy unquiet spectres lurking in its gloomy
shadows, waiting for the night Yet Zelma's heart yearned toward it, and
she murmured softly, as she turned away, "Wait for me, love!"

The play, on this night, was "The Fair Penitent." In the character of
Calista Mrs. Bury had always been accounted great, though it was
distasteful to her. Indeed, for the entire play she expressed only
contempt and aversion; yet she played her part in it faithfully and
carefully, as she performed all professional tasks.

In reading this tragedy now, one is at a loss to understand how such
trash could have been tolerated at the very time of the revival of a
pure dramatic literature,--how such an unsavored broth of sentiment,
such a meagre hash of heroics, could have been relished, even when
served by Kembles, after the rich, varied, Olympian banquets of
Shakspeare.

The argument is briefly this:--

Calista, daughter of Sciolto, is betrothed to Altamount, a young lord,
favored by Sciolto. Altamount has a friend, Horatio, and an enemy,
Lothario, secretly the lover and seducer of Calista, whose dishonor is