It was but a brief while, scarcely the lifetime of a rose,—­the fragrant snow of the hawthorn blossoms had not melted from the hedges since they met,—­and yet, in that little season, the deepest, divinest mystery of human life had grown clear and familiar to their hearts, and was conned as the simplest lesson of Nature.

To Zelma the romance and secrecy of this love had an inexpressible charm.  The Zincala in her nature revelled in its wildness and adventure, in its crime against the respectable conventionalities she despised.  She had a keen pleasure in the very management and concealment to which she was compelled;—­her imagination, even more than her heart, was engaged in hiding and guarding this charming mystery.

On the day succeeding her first interview with the young actor in the lane, she had tried to beguile her ennui, while lingering in her lonely bower, by curiously peering into the nest of a blackbird, deeply hidden in the long grass at the foot of the hedge, and which she had before discovered by the prophetic murmurs of the mother-bird.  She found five eggs in the nest.  She took the little blue wonders in her hand, and thought what lives of sinless joy, what raptures and loves, what exultations of song and soaring slept in those tiny shells!  Suddenly, there was an alarmed cry and an anxious flutter of wings in the hedge above her!  She turned, and saw the mother-bird eyeing her askance.  From that day the lowly nest with its profaned treasures was forsaken, and the world was the poorer in gladness and melody by five bird-lives of joy and song that might have been.

So, had any luckless intruder chanced to discover Zelma’s trysting-place, thrown open to the world the hidden romance in which she took such shy and secret delight, and handled in idle gossip the delicate joys and fragile hopes of young love, it is more than likely that she would have been frightened away from bower and lane, shocked and disenchanted.  But the preoccupation of her cousin and her own eccentric and solitary habits prevented suspicion and inquiry,—­no unfriendly spy, no rude, untoward event, disturbed the quiet and seclusion of this charmed scene of her wooing, where Nature, Romance, and Poetry were in league with Love.

The players played out their engagement at Arden, with the usual supplement, “A few nights only by special request,” and were off to a neighboring town.  On their last night, after the play, Zelma met her lover by moonlight, at the trysting-place in the lane, for a parting interview.

It was there that the actor, doffing the jaunty hat which usually crowned his “comely head,” and, flinging himself on his knees before his fair mistress, entreated her to rule his wayward heart, share his precarious fortunes, and bear his humble name.

Poor Zelma, when in imagination she had rehearsed her betrothal scene, had made her part something like this:—­“And then will I extend my hand with stately grace, and say to my kneeling knight, ’Arise!’—­and after, in such brief, gracious words as queens may use, (for is not every woman beloved a queen?) pronounce his happy doom.”