The health of the actress had been long declining, under the almost unsuspected attacks of a slow, insidious disease.  She was more weak and ill than she would confess, even to herself; she wanted change, she said, only change.  She never dreamed of rest.  Week after week she travelled,—­never tarrying long enough In one place to weary of it,—­the peaceful sights and sounds of rural life tranquillizing and refreshing her soul, as the clear expanse of its sky, the green of its woods and parks, the daisied swell of its downs refreshed and soothed her eye, tired of striking forever against dull brick walls and struggling with smoke and fog.

Then May came round,—­the haunted month of all the year for her.  The hawthorn-hedges burst into flower,—­the high-ways and by-paths and lanes became Milky Ways of bloom, and all England was once more veined with fragrance.

They were in the North, when one morning Zelma was startled by hearing the manager say that the next night they should play at Walton.  It was there that Lawrence Bury died; it was there he slept, in the stranger’s unvisited grave.  She would seek out that grave and sink on it, as on the breast of one beloved, though long estranged.  It would cool the dull, ceaseless fever of her heart to press it against the cold mound, and to whisper into the rank grass her faithful remembrance, her forgiveness, her unconquerable love.

But it was late when the players reached Walton; and, after the necessary arrangements for the evening were concluded, Zelma found that she had no time for a pilgrimage to the parish churchyard.  She could see it from a window of her lodgings;—­it was high-walled, dark and damp, crowded with quaint, mossy tomb-stones, and brooded over by immemorial yews.  In the deepening, misty twilight, there was something awful in the spot.  It was easy to fancy unquiet spectres lurking in its gloomy shadows, waiting for the night Yet Zelma’s heart yearned toward it, and she murmured softly, as she turned away, “Wait for me, love!”

The play, on this night, was “The Fair Penitent.”  In the character of Calista Mrs. Bury had always been accounted great, though it was distasteful to her.  Indeed, for the entire play she expressed only contempt and aversion; yet she played her part in it faithfully and carefully, as she performed all professional tasks.

In reading this tragedy now, one is at a loss to understand how such trash could have been tolerated at the very time of the revival of a pure dramatic literature,—­how such an unsavored broth of sentiment, such a meagre hash of heroics, could have been relished, even when served by Kembles, after the rich, varied, Olympian banquets of Shakspeare.

The argument is briefly this:—­