Calista, daughter of Sciolto, is betrothed to Altamount, a young lord, favored by Sciolto.  Altamount has a friend, Horatio, and an enemy, Lothario, secretly the lover and seducer of Calista, whose dishonor is discovered by Horatio, shortly after her marriage with Altamount, to whom he reveals it.  Calista denies the charge, with fierce indignation and scorn; and the young husband believes her and discredits his friend.  But the fourth act brings the guilt of Calista and the villany of Lothario fully to light.  Lothario is killed by the injured husband, Sciolto goes mad with shame and rage, and Calista falls into a state of despair and penitence.

The fifth act opens with Sciolto’s elaborate preparations for vengeance on his daughter.  The stage directions for this scene are,—­

    ["A room hung with black:  on one side Lothario’s
        body on a bier; on the other a table,
        with a skull and other bones, a book, and a
        lamp on it.  Calista is discovered on a couch,
        in black, her hair hanging loose and disordered. 
        After soft music, she rises and comes
        forward.”]

She takes the book from the table, but, finding it the pious prosing of some “lazy, dull, luxurious gownsman,” flings it aside.  She examines the cross-bones curiously, lays her hand on the skull, soliloquizing upon mortality, somewhat in the strain of Hamlet; then peers into the coffin of Lothario, beholds his pale visage, “grim with clotted blood,” and the stern, unwinking stare of his dead eyes.  Sciolto enters and bids her prepare to die; but while she stands meek and unresisting before him, his heart fails him; he rushes out, and is shortly after killed by Lothario’s faction.  Calista then dies by her own hand, leaving Altamount desperate and despairing.

Poor Calista is neither a lovely nor a lofty character; but there is something almost grand in her fierce pride, in her defiant hauteur, in her mighty struggle with shame.  Mrs. Siddons made the part terribly impressive.  Mrs. Bury softened it somewhat, giving it a womanly dignity and pathos that would seem foreign and almost impossible to the character.

* * * * *

When Zelma entered her dressing-room, on that first night at Walton, she found on her table a small spray of hawthorn-blossoms.

“How came these flowers here?” she asked, in a hurried, startled tone.

“I placed them there,” replied her little maid, Susan, half-frightened by the strange agitation of her mistress.  “I plucked the sprig in our landlady’s garden; for I remembered that you loved hawthorn-blossoms, and used often to buy them in Covent-Garden Market.”

“Ah, yes; thank you, Susan.  I do indeed love them, and I will wear them to-night.”

As she said this, she placed the flowers in her bosom,—­but, the little maid noticed, not as an ornament, but quite out of sight, where her close bodice would crush them against her heart.