“I wish I was at work again! I am sick of my holyday already! Since I cannot afford to abandon this hateful art, I wish I were always delving at it, and there came no pause for self-recollection. I wish I were perpetually Queen Katherine, Mrs. Haller, Isabella, Imogene, Lady Macbeth, Bianca Fazio, and the others, going incessantly through the circle like the earth through the signs of the zodiac. I wish I were always somebody else, anybody else than poor Ida Knight.” And she threw herself into a chair, glancing at Zuleime with a strained, appealing, accusing look. But the wan face of the dying girl, with its hectic flush, smote the rock in her heart, and she moved to her side and took her hand and said, gently, though with the same tone and look of querulous suffering. “It _is_ a wretched life! I feel it so—only it is not so bad as starving, and seeing your child starve. My dear, it _is_ something to me whether I persuade you to do this thing or not. I cannot bear to see you suffer so. Your necessities weigh upon my heart in addition to my own. And really,” she added, with the same frowning, irritated look, “really, I have such a burden of my own, that I grow restive under a feather of anybody else’s.” “Then do not take my sorrows on your shoulders, dear lady; I can bear them myself, or die under their weight uncomplainingly. Do not take my troubles to heart!” said Zuleime, gently. The actress looked up with a sharp, rebuking glance, saying— “As if I could help it! You are not sincere when you ask me to do so! No, the only way I can get your griefs off my heart is to get them off your own. I must get you into _living_ circumstances. I must persuade you to go on the stage with me. It is not a pleasant profession for a lady, I grant you—neither is freezing or starving, and getting into debt and being dunned and rebuffed, pleasant—but—” she added, with a look of almost fierce self-assertion and self-defence—“neither is it actually _sinful_, that I know of. It necessarily transgresses no command of God with which I am acquainted. One need not be a heathen because she is an actress. Mrs. Siddons was a member in full communion with the Church of England. The stage has its dangers, I grant you, but you may safely pass through them, if you please. I have done so! I was not born or brought up to that life, my dear; I was the daughter of an English country curate—then a nursery governess—then a traveling companion to an earl’s daughter—then I accidentally met with my husband, and we married from mutual affection. He was a tragedian—that is the way in which I became an actress. Now I follow the histrionic profession as the only means of living left open to me. I have seen the dangers—nay, I have _felt_ them. But nightly—no matter how utterly wearied out with toil I may have been, I have uttered two lines of sincere prayer, that God would keep me from falling into deeper sin. And He has kept me! Does that surprise you? God