Unspeakable was the dismay of Mr. Bury at finding that a very modest amount of personal property was all that his runaway wife could hope to receive from her relatives,—­that she was utterly portionless, her father having more than exhausted the patrimony of a younger son.  He had supposed, from Zelma’s apparently honorable position in the household of her uncle, that she was, if not an heiress, at least respectably dowered.  Had he been better informed, it is doubtful whether, improvident and enamored as he was, he would have ruralized and practicalized Romeo in the lane of Burleigh Grange.  Zelma herself, too unworldly to suspect that self-interest had anything to do with her conquest, never alluded to her lack of dowry till it was too late.  Then both manly shame and manly passion (for the actor loved her in his way, which was by no means her way, or the way of any large, loyal nature) restrained all unbecoming expression of chagrin and disappointment,—­ which yet sunk into his heart, and prepared the not uncongenial coil for a goodly crop of suspicion, jealousy, alienation, aversion, and all manner of domestic infelicities.

We cannot follow Zelma step by step, in her precarious and wandering life, for the six months succeeding her marriage.  It was a life not altogether distasteful to her.  She was not enough of a fine lady to be dismayed or humiliated by its straits and shifts of poverty, by its isolation and ostracism; while there was something in its alternations of want and profusion, in its piquant contrasts of real and mimic life, in its excitement, action, and change, which had a peculiar charm for her wild and restless spirit.  But from many of the associations of the stage, from nearly all actors and actresses, and from all green-room loungers, she instinctively recoiled, and held herself haughtily aloof from the motley little world behind the scenes,—­apparently by no effort, but as sphered apart by the atmosphere of refinement and superiority which enveloped her.  Yet she almost constantly accompanied her husband to rehearsal and play, where, for a time, her presence was grateful both to the pride and a more amiable passion of her mercurial lord.  But the sight of that shy, shadowy figure haunting the wings, of those keen, critical eyes ever following the business of the stage, at last grew irksome to him, and he would fain have persuaded her to remain quietly at their lodgings, whilst he was attending to his professional duties.  But no, she would go with him,—­not for pleasure, or even affection, but, as she always avowed, for artistic purposes.  That she had cherished, ever since her marriage, the plan of adopting her husband’s profession, she had never concealed from him.  He usually laughed, in his gay, supercilious way, when she spoke of this purpose, or lightly patted her grand head and declared her to be a wilful, unpractical enthusiast,—­too much a child of Nature to attempt an art of any kind,—­born to live and be poetry, not to declaim it,—­to inspire genius, not to embody it,—­a Muse, not a Sibyl.