“She has gone mad!  Take her away!” shouted the excited audience; but before any one could reach her, she had fallen on the stage in strong convulsions.

The actors raised her and bore her out; and as they did so, a little stream of blood was seen to bubble from her lips.  A medical man, who happened to be present, having proffered his services, was hurried behind the scenes to where the sufferer lay, on a rude couch in the green-room, surrounded by the frightened players, and wept over by her faithful little maid.

The audience lingered awhile within sound of the fitful, frenzied cries of the dying actress, and then dispersed in dismay and confusion.

Zelma remained for some hours convulsed and delirious; but toward morning she sank into a deep, swoon-like sleep of utter exhaustion.  She awoke from this, quite sane and calm, but marble-white and cold,—­the work of death all done, it seemed, save the dashing out of the sad, wild light yet burning in her sunken eyes.  But the bright red blood no longer oozed from her lips, and they told her she was better.  She gave no heed to the assurance, but, somewhat in her old, quick, decisive way, called for the manager.  Scarcely had he reached her side, when she began to question him eagerly, though in hoarse, failing tones, in regard to the skull used in the play of the preceding night.  The manager had procured it of the sexton, he said, and knew nothing more of it.

She sent for the sexton.  He came,—­a man “of the earth, earthy,”—­a man with a grave-ward stoop and a strange uneven gait, caught in forty years’ stumbling over mounds.  A smell of turf and mould, an odor of mortality, went before him.

He approached the couch of the actress, and looked down upon her with a curious, professional look, as though he were peering into a face newly coffined or freshly exhumed; but when Zelma fixed her live eyes upon him, angry and threatening, and asked, in abrupt, yet solemn tones, “Whose was that skull you brought for me last night?” he fell back with an exclamation of surprise and terror.  As soon as he could collect himself sufficiently, he replied, that, to the best of his knowledge, the skull had belonged to a poor play-actor, who had died in the parish some sixteen or, it might be, eighteen years before; and compelled by the merciless inquisition of those eyes, fixed and stern, though dilating with horror, he added, that, if his memory served him well, the player’s name was Bury.

A strong shudder shivered through the poor woman’s frame at this confirmation of the awful revealment of the previous night; but she replied calmly, though with added sternness,—­“He was my husband.  How dared you disturb his bones?  Are you a ghoul, that you burrow among graves and steal from the dead?”

The poor man eagerly denied being anything so inhuman.  The skull had rolled into a grave he had been digging by the side of the almost forgotten grave of the poor player; and, as the manager had bespoken one for the play, he had thought it no harm to furnish him this.  But he would put it back carefully into its place that very day.