On the following day, sweet Bessie Burleigh, with the consent, at the request even, of her father, sought out her famous cousin, bearing terms of reconciliation and proffers of renewed affection.

The actress was alone.  She had just risen from her late breakfast, and was in a morning costume,—­careless, but not untidy.  She looked languid and jaded; the beautiful light of young love, which the night before had shone with a soft, lambent flame in every glance, seemed to have burned itself out in her hollow eyes, or to have been quenched in tears.

She flung herself on her cousin’s breast with a laugh of pure joy and a child’s quick impulse of lovingness; but almost immediately drew herself back, as with a sudden sense of having leaned across a chasm in the embrace.  But Bessie, guessing her feeling, clung about her very tenderly, calling her pet names, smoothing her hair and kissing her wan cheek till she almost kissed back its faded roses.  And infinite good she did poor Zelma.

Bessie—­dear, simple heart!—­was no diplomatist; she did not creep stealthily toward her object, but dashed at it at once.

“I am come, dearest Zelle, to win you home,” she said.  “You cannot think how lonely it is at the Grange, now that dear mamma is gone; and by-and-by it will be yet more lonely,—­at least, for poor papa.  He loves you still, though he was angry with you at first,—­and he longs to have you come back, and to make it all up with you.  Oh, I am sure, you must be weary of this life,—­or rather, this mockery of life, this prolonged fever dream, this playing with passion and pain!  It is killing you!  Why, you look worn and anxious and sad as death by daylight, though you do bloom out strangely bright and beautiful on the stage.  So, dear, come into the country, and rest and renew your life.”

Zelma opened her superb eyes in amazement, and her cheek kindled with a little flush of displeasure; yet she answered playfully,—­“What! would you resolve ‘the new star of the drama’ into nebulousness and nothingness again?  Remember my art, sweet Coz; I am a priestess sworn to its altar.”

“But, surely,” replied Bessie, ingenuously, “you will not live on thus alone, unprotected, a mark for suspicion and calumny; for they say—­they say that your husband has deserted you.”

“Mr. Bury is absent, fulfilling a professional engagement.  I shall await his return here,” replied Zelma, haughtily.

Bessie blushed deeply and was silent.  So, too, was the actress, for some moments; then, softened almost to tears, half closing her eyes, and letting her fancy float away like thistle-down over town and country, upland, valley, and moor, she said softly,—­“Dear Burleigh Grange, how lovely it must be now!  What a verdurous twilight reigns under the old elms of the avenue!—­in what a passion of bloom the roses are unfolding to the sun, these warm May-days!  How the honeysuckles drip with sweet dews! how thickly the shed hawthorn-blossoms lie on the grass of the long lane, rolling in little drifts before the wind!  And the birds,—­do the same birds come back to nest in their old places about the Grange, I wonder?”