k you, Susan. I do indeed love them, and I will wear them
to-night."

As she said this, she placed the flowers in her bosom,--but, the little
maid noticed, not as an ornament, but quite out of sight, where her
close bodice would crush them against her heart.

During the first acts of the play, Zelma was languid, absent, and more
unequal than usual. A strange sense of evil, a vague foreboding, haunted
her. It was in vain that she said to herself, "What have I, a lonely,
disappointed woman, loveless and joyless, to fear of misfortune
more,--since death itself were welcome as change, and doubly welcome as
rest?" The nameless fear still clung to her, sending cold thrills along
her veins, fiercely grasping and holding her palpitating heart.

When, in the last act, reclining on her sombre couch, she waited through
the playing of the "soft music," there came to her a little season of
respite and calm. Tender thoughts, and sweet, wild fancies of other days
revisited her. The wilted hawthorn-blossoms in her bosom seemed to
revive and to pour forth volumes of fragrance, which enveloped her like
an atmosphere; and as she rose and advanced slowly toward the
foot-lights, winking dimly like funeral lamps amid the gloom of the
scene, it strangely seemed to her that she was going down the long,
sweet lane of Burleigh Grange. The magic of that perfume, and something
of kindred sweetness in the sad, wailing music, brought old times and
scenes before her with preternatural distinctness. Then she became
conscious of a _something_ making still darker and deeper the gloomy
shadows cast by the black hangings of the scene,--a presence, not
palpable or visible to the senses, but terribly real to the finer
perceptions of the spirit,--a presence unearthly, yet familiar and
commanding, persistent, resistless, unappeasable,--moving as she moved,
pausing as she paused, clutching at her hands, and searching after her
eyes. The air about her seemed heavy with a brooding horror which sought
to resolve itself into shape,--the dread mystery of life in death
waiting to be revealed. Her own soul seemed groping and beating against
the veil which hides the unseen; she gasped, she trembled, and great
drops, like the distillation of the last mortal anguish, burst from her
forehead.

She was roused by a murmur of applause from the audience. She was acting
so well! Nerving herself by an almost superhuman effort, her
phantom-haunted soul standing at bay, she