Zelma recovered from this illness, if it could be called a recovery, to a state of only tolerable physical health, and a condition of pitiable mental apathy and languor.  She turned with a half-weary, half-petulant distaste from her former pursuits and pleasures, and abandoned her profession with a sort of terror,—­feeling that its mockery of sorrows, such as had fallen so crushingly on her unchastened heart, would madden her utterly.  But neither could she endure again the constraint and conventionalities of English private life; she had died to her art, and she glided, like a phantom, out of her country, and out of the thoughts of the public, in whose breath she had lived, for whose pleasure she had toiled, often from the hidden force of her own sorrows, the elements of all tragedy seething in her secret heart.

Year after year she lived a wandering, out-of-the-way life on the Continent.  It was said that she went to Spain, sought out her mother’s wild kindred, and dwelt with them, making their life her life, their ways her ways, shrinking neither from sun-glare nor tempest, privation nor peril.  But, at length, tired of wandering and satiated with adventure, she flung off the Zincala, returned to England, and even returned, forsworn, to her art, as all do, or long to do, who have once embraced it from a genuine passion.

She made no effort to obtain an engagement at Covent Garden; for her, that stage was haunted by a presence more gloomy than Hamlet, more dreadful than the Ghost.  Nor did she seek to tread, with her free, unpractised step, the classic boards of Drury Lane,—­where Garrick, the Grand Monarque of the Drama, though now toward the end of his reign, ruled with jealous, despotic sway,—­but modestly and quietly appeared at a minor theatre, seeming, to such play-goers as remembered her brief, brilliant career and sudden disappearance, like the Muse of Tragedy returned from the shades.

She was kindly received, both for her own sake, and because of the pleasant memories which the sight of her, pale, slender, and sad-eyed, yet beautiful still, revived.  Those who had once sworn by her swore by her still, and were loath to admit even to themselves that her early style of acting—­easy, flowing, impulsive, the natural translation in action of a strong and imaginative nature—­must remain what, in the long absence of the actress, it had become, a beautiful tradition of the stage,—­that her present personations were wanting in force and spontaneity,—­that they were efforts, rather than inspirations,—­were marked by a weary tension of thought,—­were careful, but not composed, roughened by unsteady strokes of genius, freshly furrowed with labor.