let at the feet of Ophelia, he rambled on from subject
to subject, in a careless, graceful way, plucking up grass and picking
daisies to pieces, as he talked, giving every now and then, from beneath
the languid sweep of his heavy eyelashes, quick flashes of tender
meaning, as fitful and beautiful as the "heat-lightnings" of summer
twilights, and _apparently_ as harmless.

There was something so magnetic and contagious in this frank,
confiding manner, that Zelma, ere she was aware, grew unrestrained and
communicative in turn. One by one, the icicles of pride and reserve,
which a strange and ungenial atmosphere had hung around her affluent and
spontaneous nature, melted in the unwanted sunshine, dropped away from
her, and the quick bloom of a Southern heart revealed itself in
smiles and blushes. The divine poet whose volume she now held clasped
caressingly in both hands had prepared the way for this, by sending
through every vein and fibre of her being the sweet, subtile essence of
passionate thought,--the spring-tide of youth and love, which makes the
story of Romeo and Juliet glow and throb with immortal freshness and
vitality.

So, at length, those two talked freely and pleasantly together. They
discussed the quiet rural scenery around them, the deep green valley of
Arden, shut in by an almost unbroken circle of hills, and Zelma told of
a peculiar silvery mist which sometimes floated over it, like the ghost
of the lake which, it was said, once filled it; they spoke of wood,
stream, moor, and waterfall, sunsets and moonlight and stars, poetry
and--love; floating slowly, and almost unconsciously, down the smooth
current of summer talk and youthful fancies, toward the ocean of all
their thoughts, whose mysterious murmurs already filled one heart at
least with a tender awe and a vague longing, which was yet half fear.

The next day, and the next, and every day while the players remained at
Arden, the two friends met by tacit agreement in the lane of Burleigh
Grange, and, gradually, Lawrence Bury became less the actor and more
the man, in the presence of a genuine woman, without affectation or
artifice, stage-rant or art-cant,--one from whose face the glare of the
foot-lights had not stricken the natural bloom, whose heart had never
burned with the feverish excitement of the stage, its insatiable
ambition, its animosities and exceeding fierce jealousies. For Zelma,
she grew more humble and simple and less exacting, the mo