After a little time, Zelma, to prove her freedom from embarrassment or suspicion, quietly seated herself on the rustic bench, giving, as she did so, a regal spread to her ample skirts, that there might be no vacant place beside her.  The actor stood for a while before her, just going, but never gone, talking gayly, but respectfully, on indifferent topics,—­till, at last, touching on some theme of deeper interest, and apparently forgetting everything but it and the fair lady, who neither expressed nor looked a desire to shorten the interview, he flung himself, with what seemed a boy’s natural impulse, upon the soft, inviting turf, under the shade of the willow.  There, reclining in the attitude of Hamlet 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 more she bestowed from a “bounty boundless as the sea.”