went before him.

He approached the couch of the actress, and looked down upon her with a
curious, professional look, as though he were peering into a face newly
coffined or freshly exhumed; but when Zelma fixed her live eyes upon
him, angry and threatening, and asked, in abrupt, yet solemn tones,
"Whose was that skull you brought for me last night?" he fell back with
an exclamation of surprise and terror. As soon as he could collect
himself sufficiently, he replied, that, to the best of his knowledge,
the skull had belonged to a poor play-actor, who had died in the parish
some sixteen or, it might be, eighteen years before; and compelled by
the merciless inquisition of those eyes, fixed and stern, though
dilating with horror, he added, that, if his memory served him well, the
player's name was _Bury_.

A strong shudder shivered through the poor woman's frame at this
confirmation of the awful revealment of the previous night; but she
replied calmly, though with added sternness,--"He was my husband. How
dared you disturb his bones? Are you a ghoul, that you burrow among
graves and steal from the dead?"

The poor man eagerly denied being anything so inhuman. The skull had
rolled into a grave he had been digging by the side of the almost
forgotten grave of the poor player; and, as the manager had bespoken one
for the play, he had thought it no harm to furnish him this. But he
would put it back carefully into its place that very day.

"See that you do it, man, if you value the repose of your own soul!"
said Zelma, with an awful impressiveness, raising herself on one elbow
and looking him out of the room.

When he was gone, she sunk back and murmured, partly to herself, partly
to her little maid, who wept through all, the more that she did not
understand,--"I knew it was so; it was needless to ask. Well, 'tis well;
he will forgive me, now that I come when he calls me, accomplishing to
the utmost my vow. He will make peace with me, when I take my old place
at his side,--when my head shall lie as low as his,--when he sees that
all the laurels have dropped away,--when he sees the sorrow shining
through the dark of my hair in rifts of silver."

After a little time she grew restless, and would return to her lodgings.

As the doctor and her attendant were about placing her in a sedan-chair
to bear her away, a strange desire seized her to behold the theatre and
tread the boards once more. They conducted her to the centre of