During the first acts of the play, Zelma was languid, absent, and more unequal than usual.  A strange sense of evil, a vague foreboding, haunted her.  It was in vain that she said to herself, “What have I, a lonely, disappointed woman, loveless and joyless, to fear of misfortune more,—­since death itself were welcome as change, and doubly welcome as rest?” The nameless fear still clung to her, sending cold thrills along her veins, fiercely grasping and holding her palpitating heart.

When, in the last act, reclining on her sombre couch, she waited through the playing of the “soft music,” there came to her a little season of respite and calm.  Tender thoughts, and sweet, wild fancies of other days revisited her.  The wilted hawthorn-blossoms in her bosom seemed to revive and to pour forth volumes of fragrance, which enveloped her like an atmosphere; and as she rose and advanced slowly toward the foot-lights, winking dimly like funeral lamps amid the gloom of the scene, it strangely seemed to her that she was going down the long, sweet lane of Burleigh Grange.  The magic of that perfume, and something of kindred sweetness in the sad, wailing music, brought old times and scenes before her with preternatural distinctness.  Then she became conscious of a something making still darker and deeper the gloomy shadows cast by the black hangings of the scene,—­a presence, not palpable or visible to the senses, but terribly real to the finer perceptions of the spirit,—­a presence unearthly, yet familiar and commanding, persistent, resistless, unappeasable,—­moving as she moved, pausing as she paused, clutching at her hands, and searching after her eyes.  The air about her seemed heavy with a brooding horror which sought to resolve itself into shape,—­the dread mystery of life in death waiting to be revealed.  Her own soul seemed groping and beating against the veil which hides the unseen; she gasped, she trembled, and great drops, like the distillation of the last mortal anguish, burst from her forehead.

She was roused by a murmur of applause from the audience.  She was acting so well!  Nerving herself by an almost superhuman effort, her phantom-haunted soul standing at bay, she approached the table, and began, in a voice but slightly broken, the reading of her melancholy soliloquy.  But, as she laid her hand on the skull, she gave a wild start of horror,—­not at the touch of the cold, smooth bone, nor at the blank, black stare of the eyeless sockets, but at finding beneath her hand a mass of soft, curling hair, damp, as with night-dew!—­at beholding eyes with “speculation” in them,—­ay, with human passions, luminous and full,—­eyes that now yearned with love, now burned with hate,—­ah, God! the eyes of Lawrence Bury!

With a shrill, frenzied shriek, Zelma sprang back and stood for a moment shuddering and crouching in a mute agony of fear.  Then she burst into wild cries of grief and passionate entreaty, stretching her tremulous hands into the void air, in piteous imploring.