re she bestowed
from a "bounty boundless as the sea."

It was but a brief while, scarcely the lifetime of a rose,--the fragrant
snow of the hawthorn blossoms had not melted from the hedges since they
met,--and yet, in that little season, the deepest, divinest mystery of
human life had grown clear and familiar to their hearts, and was conned
as the simplest lesson of Nature.

To Zelma the romance and secrecy of this love had an inexpressible
charm. The Zincala in her nature revelled in its wildness and adventure,
in its crime against the respectable conventionalities she despised. She
had a keen pleasure in the very management and concealment to which she
was compelled;--her imagination, even more than her heart, was engaged
in hiding and guarding this charming mystery.

On the day succeeding her first interview with the young actor in the
lane, she had tried to beguile her _ennui_, while lingering in her
lonely bower, by curiously peering into the nest of a blackbird, deeply
hidden in the long grass at the foot of the hedge, and which she had
before discovered by the prophetic murmurs of the mother-bird. She found
five eggs in the nest. She took the little blue wonders in her hand,
and thought what lives of sinless joy, what raptures and loves, what
exultations of song and soaring slept in those tiny shells! Suddenly,
there was an alarmed cry and an anxious flutter of wings in the hedge
above her! She turned, and saw the mother-bird eyeing her askance. From
that day the lowly nest with its profaned treasures was forsaken, and
the world was the poorer in gladness and melody by five bird-lives of
joy and song that might have been.

So, had any luckless intruder chanced to discover Zelma's
trysting-place, thrown open to the world the hidden romance in which
she took such shy and secret delight, and handled in idle gossip the
delicate joys and fragile hopes of young love, it is more than likely
that she would have been frightened away from bower and lane, shocked
and disenchanted. But the preoccupation of her cousin and her own
eccentric and solitary habits prevented suspicion and inquiry,--no
unfriendly spy, no rude, untoward event, disturbed the quiet and
seclusion of this charmed scene of her wooing, where Nature, Romance,
and Poetry were in league with Love.

The players played out their engagement at Arden, with the usual
supplement, "A few nights only by special request," and were off to a
neighboring town. On t