So, at length, those two talked freely and pleasantly together. They discussed the quiet rural scenery around them, the deep green valley of Arden, shut in by an almost unbroken circle of hills, and Zelma told of a peculiar silvery mist which sometimes floated over it, like the ghost of the lake which, it was said, once filled it; they spoke of wood, stream, moor, and waterfall, sunsets and moonlight and stars, poetry and--love; floating slowly, and almost unconsciously, down the smooth current of summer talk and youthful fancies, toward the ocean of all their thoughts, whose mysterious murmurs already filled one heart at least with a tender awe and a vague longing, which was yet half fear. The next day, and the next, and every day while the players remained at Arden, the two friends met by tacit agreement in the lane of Burleigh Grange, and, gradually, Lawrence Bury became less the actor and more the man, in the presence of a genuine woman, without affectation or artifice, stage-rant or art-cant,--one from whose face the glare of the foot-lights had not stricken the natural bloom, whose heart had never burned with the feverish excitement of the stage, its insatiable ambition, its animosities and exceeding fierce jealousies. For Zelma, she grew more humble and simple and less exacting, the more 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.