This scene closes with a memorable speech:—­

    “Vile and ingrate! too late thou shalt repent
    The base injustice thou hast done my love! 
    Ay, thou shalt know, spite of thy past distress,
    And all the evils thou so long hast mourned,
    Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
    Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned!”

Zelma gave these lines as no pre-Siddonian actress had ever given them,—­with a certain sublimity of rage, the ire of an immortal,—­and swept off the scene before a wild tumult of applause, led by the vanquished critics.  It followed her, surge on surge, to her dressing-room, whither she hastily retreated through a crowd of players and green-room habitues.

That sudden tempest shook even the royal box.  The King, who a short time before had been observed to nod, not shaking his “ambrosial locks” in Jove-like approval, but somnolently, started up, exclaiming, “What! what! what’s that?”—­and the Queen—­took snuff.

In her dressing-room Zelma waited for her husband.  “Surely he will come now,” she said.

She had already put off the tragedy-queen; she was again the loving wife, yearning for one proud smile, one tender word, one straining embrace.  The tempest outside the curtain still rolled in upon her, as she sat alone, drooping and sad, a spent thunder-cloud.  The sound brought her no sense of triumph; she only looked around her drearily, like a frightened child, and called, “Lawrence!”

Instead of him came the manager.  She must go before the curtain; the audience would not be denied.

Lawrence led her out,—­holding her hot, trembling fingers in his cold, nerveless hand, a moody frown on his brow, and his lips writhing with a forced smile.

As Zelma bent and smiled in modest acknowledgment of renewed applause, led by royalty itself,—­her aspirations so speedily fulfilled, her genius so early crowned,—­even at that supreme moment, the grief of the woman would have outweighed the triumph of the artist, and saddened all those plaudits into knell-like sounds, could she have known that the miserable fiends of envy and jealousy had grasped her husband’s heart and torn it out of her possession forever.

In the death-scene, where the full tide of womanly feeling, which has been driven out of Zara’s heart by the volcanic shocks of fierce passions, comes pouring back with whelming force, Zelma lost none of her power, but won new laurels, bedewed with tears from “eyes unused to weep.”

Zara dies by her own hand, clinging to the headless body of King Manuel, believing it to be Osmyn’s.  Zelma gave the concluding lines of her part brokenly, in a tone of almost childlike lamenting, with piteous murmurs and penitent caresses:—­