But it was in the third act that she won her highest triumph.  The act opened with a scene between Elvira and her husband, in which she implored him, with the humility and hopelessness of grief, to allow her to retire from the world and to hide the beauty which had wrought such ruin from the light of day.  He, in whom jealousy has taken fierce root, refuses with reproach and insult, and in the full tide of her passionate reaction against his tyranny, the news is brought her by Beatriz that Fernan, in his determination to avoid the duel with Macias on the morrow, which the Duke, in accordance with knightly usage, has been forced to grant, has devised means for assassinating his rival in prison.  Naturally, her whole soul is thrown into an effort to save her lover.  She bribes his guards.  She sends Beatriz to denounce the treachery of her husband to the Duke, and, finally, she herself penetrates into the cell of Macias, to warn him of the fate that threatens him and to persuade him to fly.

It was, indeed, a dramatic moment when the gloom of Macias’s cell was first broken by the glimmer of the hand-lamp, which revealed to the vast expectant audience the form of Elvira standing on the threshold, searching the darkness with her shaded eyes; and in the great love scene which followed the first sharp impression was steadily deepened word by word and gesture after gesture by the genius of the actress.  Elvira finds Macias in a mood of calm and even joyful waiting for the morrow.  His honour is satisfied; death and battle are before him, and the proud Castilian is almost at peace.  The vision of Elvira’s pale beauty and his quick intuition of the dangers she has run in forcing her way to him produce a sudden revulsion of feeling towards her, a flood of passionate reconciliation; he is at her feet once more; he feels that she is true, that she is his.  She, in a frenzy of fear, cannot succeed for all her efforts in dimming his ecstasy of joy or in awakening him to the necessity of flight, and at last he even resents her terror for him, her entreaties that he will forget her and escape.

‘Great heaven!’ he says, turning from her in despair, ’it was not love, it was only pity that brought her here.’  Then, broken down by the awful pressure of the situation, her love resists his no longer, but rather she sees in the full expression of her own heart the only chance of reconciling him to life, and of persuading him to take thought for his own safety.

’Elvira. See, Macias! these tears—­each one is yours, is wept for you!  Oh, if to soften that proud will of yours this hapless woman must needs open all her weak heart to you, if she must needs tell you that she lives only in your life and dies in your death, her lip will brace itself even to that pitiful confession!  Ah me! these poor cheeks have been so blanched with weeping, they have no blushes left.’