At length, finding himself at the lowest ebb of theatrical favor, and hating horribly the scene of his humiliating defeat, Mr. Bury resolved to return to his old strolling life in the provinces.  Making at the same moment the first announcement of his going and his hurried adieux to Zelma, who heard his last cold words in dumb dismay, with little show of emotion, but with heavy grief and dread presentiments at her heart, he departed.  He was accompanied by the fair actress with whom he played first parts at Arden,—­but now, green-room gossip said, not in a merely professional association.  This story was brought to Zelma; but her bitter cup was full without it.  With a noble blindness, the fanaticism of wifely faith, she rejected it utterly.  “He is weak, misguided, mad,” she said, “but not so basely false as that.  He must run his wild, wretched course awhile longer,—­it seems necessary for him; but he will return at last,—­surely he will,—­sorrowful, repentant, ’in his right mind,’ himself and mine once more.  He cannot weary out God’s patience and my love.”

After the first shock of her desertion was past, Zelma was conscious of a sense of relief from a weight of daily recurring care and humiliation, the torture of an unloving presence, chill and ungenial as arctic sunlight.  Even in the cold blank of his absence there was something grateful to her bruised heart, like the balm of darkness to suffering eyes.  Her art was now all in all to her,—­the strong-winged passion, which lifted her out of herself and her sorrows.  She was studying Juliet for the first time.  She had been playing for more than a year before she could be prevailed upon to attempt a Shakspearian character, restrained by a profound modesty from exercising her crude powers upon one of those grand creations.

When, at length, she made choice of Juliet, what study was hers!—­how reverent! how loving! how glad!—­the perfect service of the spirit!  She shut out the world of London from her sight, from her thoughts, till it seemed lost in one of its own fogs.  The air, the sky, the passion, the poetry of Italy were above and around her.  Again she revelled in that wondrous garden of love and poesy, with a background of graves, solemnizing joy.  Now her fancy flitted, on swift, unresting wing, from beauty to beauty,—­now settled, bee-like, on some rich, half-hidden thought, and hung upon it, sucking out its most sweet and secret heart of meaning.  She steeped her soul in the delicious romance, the summer warmth, the moonlight, the sighs and tears of the play.  She went from the closet to the stage, not brain-weary and pale with thought, but fresh, tender, and virginal,—­not like one who had committed the part of Juliet, but one whom Juliet possessed in every part.  She seemed to bear about her an atmosphere of poetry and love, the subtile spirit of that marvellous play.  There was no air of study, not the faintest taint of the midnight oil;—­like a gatherer of roses from some garden of Cashmere, or a peasant-girl from the vintage, she brought only odors from her toil,—­the sweets of the fancy, a flavor of the passion she had made her own.