discovered by Horatio, shortly after her marriage with Altamount, to
whom he reveals it. Calista denies the charge, with fierce indignation
and scorn; and the young husband believes her and discredits his friend.
But the fourth act brings the guilt of Calista and the villany of
Lothario fully to light. Lothario is killed by the injured husband,
Sciolto goes mad with shame and rage, and Calista falls into a state of
despair and penitence.

The fifth act opens with Sciolto's elaborate preparations for vengeance
on his daughter. The stage directions for this scene are,--

["A room hung with black: on one side Lothario's
body on a bier; on the other a table,
with a skull and other bones, a book, and a
lamp on it. Calista is discovered on a couch,
in black, her hair hanging loose and disordered.
After soft music, she rises and comes
forward."]

She takes the book from the table, but, finding it the pious prosing of
some "lazy, dull, luxurious gownsman," flings it aside. She examines the
cross-bones curiously, lays her hand on the skull, soliloquizing upon
mortality, somewhat in the strain of Hamlet; then peers into the coffin
of Lothario, beholds his pale visage, "grim with clotted blood," and the
stern, unwinking stare of his dead eyes. Sciolto enters and bids her
prepare to die; but while she stands meek and unresisting before him,
his heart fails him; he rushes out, and is shortly after killed by
Lothario's faction. Calista then dies by her own hand, leaving Altamount
desperate and despairing.

Poor Calista is neither a lovely nor a lofty character; but there is
something almost grand in her fierce pride, in her defiant _hauteur_, in
her mighty struggle with shame. Mrs. Siddons made the part terribly
impressive. Mrs. Bury softened it somewhat, giving it a womanly dignity
and pathos that would seem foreign and almost impossible to the
character.

* * * * *

When Zelma entered her dressing-room, on that first night at Walton, she
found on her table a small spray of hawthorn-blossoms.

"How came these flowers here?" she asked, in a hurried, startled tone.

"I placed them there," replied her little maid, Susan, half-frightened
by the strange agitation of her mistress. "I plucked the sprig in our
landlady's garden; for I remembered that you loved hawthorn-blossoms,
and used often to buy them in Covent-Garden Market."

"Ah, yes; than