In the first scene with Almeria, who was a shade worse than the Zara of the night, the young actor indulged himself in a cool, comprehensive glance at the house, over her fair shoulders.  As his keen gaze swept round the small aristocratic circle, it encountered and seemed to recognize the face of Zelma Burleigh, now kindling with a new enthusiasm, which was never wholly to die out of her breast.  There was something in the watchful, absorbed gaze of her great dark eyes so unlike the wondering or languishing looks usually bent by women upon the rising actor, that on the instant he was struck, pierced, by those subtile shafts of light, to the heart he had believed till then vowed alone to the love of his art and the schemes of a sleepless ambition.

Reluctantly he withdrew his regard from a face which bespoke a character of singular originality and force, not wanting either in womanly pride or tenderness,—­a face in which beauty itself was so subordinate to something higher, more ineffable, that one could scarcely define feature or color through the illuminated and changeful atmosphere of soul which hung about it,—­the shadows of great thoughts, the light mists of dreamy and evanescent fancy.

It was toward the close of the second act, when Sir Harry Willerton, of Willerton Hall, entered his box, accompanied by three or four dashing companions, who, it was soon whispered about, were titled young bloods from London.

Sir Harry Willerton was a fresh, frank-looking young gallant,—­fast, from the fiery impulses of youth and a high spirit,—­not pricked on by vanity, nor goaded by low passions,—­not heartless, not blase,—­the only kind of a rake for whom reformation is possible or reclamation worth the while.

Sir Harry was not fond of tragedy; and after five minutes’ strained attention to the players, he turned his eyes from the stage, and began casting easy, good-humored glances of curiosity or recognition over the audience.  He bowed to all his neighbors with a kindly familiarity, untainted by condescension, but most courteously, perhaps, to the party from the Grange.  He liked the bluff Squire heartily,—­as who did not?  Then his eye—­a laughing blue eye it was—­rested and lingered, not on the dark, dramatic face of Zelma, but on the pretty, girlish head of her cousin.

Bessie sat with her face partly averted from the baronet’s gay party, and her gaze fixed intently upon the stage.  Sir Harry could only see half the rose of one cheek, and the soft sweep of golden hair which lightly shaded it; and feasting his fancy on that bit of fluctuating color, entangled in the meshes of a tremulous screen of curls, he settled himself to await the close of the act.

It was with a child’s eager interest and pliant imagination that Bessie looked and listened,—­susceptible, credulous, unfastidious.  To her, the Osmyn of the night was radiant with all heroic qualities and manly graces, the weakly simulated sorrow of Almeria brought real tears to her eyes, and she drew her white shoulders forward with a shudder when the wooden Zara kindled into cursing and jealous rage.  Illusions most transparent to others hoodwinked her senses; her willing fancy supplied feeling, and even made up for deficiencies of art in the players, till the mimic world before her became more real than reality.