the feminine portion of his audience
grew tender with Almeria, and despairing with Zara.

In the first scene with Almeria, who was a shade worse than the Zara of
the night, the young actor indulged himself in a cool, comprehensive
glance at the house, over her fair shoulders. As his keen gaze swept
round the small aristocratic circle, it encountered and seemed
to recognize the face of Zelma Burleigh, now kindling with a new
enthusiasm, which was never wholly to die out of her breast. There was
something in the watchful, absorbed gaze of her great dark eyes so
unlike the wondering or languishing looks usually bent by women upon
the rising actor, that on the instant he was struck, pierced, by those
subtile shafts of light, to the heart he had believed till then vowed
alone to the love of his art and the schemes of a sleepless ambition.

Reluctantly he withdrew his regard from a face which bespoke a character
of singular originality and force, not wanting either in womanly pride
or tenderness,--a face in which beauty itself was so subordinate to
something higher, more ineffable, that one could scarcely define feature
or color through the illuminated and changeful atmosphere of soul which
hung about it,--the shadows of great thoughts, the light mists of dreamy
and evanescent fancy.

It was toward the close of the second act, when Sir Harry Willerton, of
Willerton Hall, entered his box, accompanied by three or four dashing
companions, who, it was soon whispered about, were titled young bloods
from London.

Sir Harry Willerton was a fresh, frank-looking young gallant,--fast,
from the fiery impulses of youth and a high spirit,--not pricked on by
vanity, nor goaded by low passions,--not heartless, not _blase_,--the
only kind of a rake for whom reformation is possible or reclamation
worth the while.

Sir Harry was not fond of tragedy; and after five minutes' strained
attention to the players, he turned his eyes from the stage, and began
casting easy, good-humored glances of curiosity or recognition over
the audience. He bowed to all his neighbors with a kindly familiarity,
untainted by condescension, but most courteously, perhaps, to the party
from the Grange. He liked the bluff Squire heartily,--as who did not?
Then his eye--a laughing blue eye it was--rested and lingered, not on
the dark, dramatic face of Zelma, but on the pretty, girlish head of her
cousin.

Bessie sat with her face partly averted from the baronet's ga