Hour after hour she sat at her table, grasping the fatal letter, still as death, and all but as cold.  She yet wore the last dress of Belvedera, and was half enveloped by the black cloud of her dishevelled hair; but the simulated frenzy, which so late had drawn shuddering sighs from a thousand hearts, was succeeded by a silent, stony despair, infinitely more terrible.  A sense of hopeless desolation and abandonment settled upon her soul; the distances of universes seemed to separate her from the dead.  But to this suddenly succeeded a chill, awful sense of a presence, wrapped in silence and mystery, melting through all material barriers, treading on the impalpable air, not “looking ancient kindness on her pain,” but lowering amid the shadows of her chamber, stern, perturbed, unreconciled.  All these lonely horrors, these wild griefs, unrelieved by human sympathy or companionship, by even the unconscious comfort which flows in the breathing of a near sleeper, crowded and pressed upon her brain, and seemed to touch her veins with frost and fire.

For long weeks, Zelma lay ill, with a slow, baffling fever.  Her mind, torn from its moorings, went wandering, wandering, over a vast sea of troubled dreams,—­now creeping on through weary stretches of calm, now plunging into the heart of tempests and tossed upon mountainous surges, now touching momently at islands of light, now wrecked upon black, desert shores.

All was strange, vague, and terrible, at first; but gradually there stole back upon her her own life of womanhood and Art,—­its scenes and changes, its struggles, temptations, and triumphs, its brief joy and long sorrow, all shaken and confused together, but still familiar.  Now the faces of her audiences seemed to throng upon her, packing her room from floor to ceiling, darkening the light, sucking up all the air, and again piercing her through and through with their cold, merciless gaze.  Now the characters she had personated grouped themselves around her bed, all distinct, yet duplicates and multiplications of herself, mocking her with her own voice, and glaring at her with her own eyes.  Now pleasant summer-scenes at Burleigh Grange brightened the dull walls, and a memory of the long lane in the white prime of its hawthorn bloom flowed like a river of fragrance through her chamber.  Then there strode in upon her a form of beauty and terror, and held her by the passion and gloom of his eye,—­and with him crept in a chill and heavy air, like an exhalation from the rank turf of neglected graves.

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