_Rebecca_ herself. Then the Pastor asks _Rebecca_ to marry him, but
is refused, for no apparent reason, unless it be that she has tired
of her guilty passion. In Act III. _Rebecca_ admits to the widower and
his brother-in-law that she has deceived the deceased, and prepares
to decamp. In the final Act the apostate Pastor declares that he has
been in love with _Rebecca_ from the first, loves her now, but is not
sure that she loves him. To set his mind at rest on this point, will
she do him a small favour? Will she be so good as to jump into the
mill-stream, and drown herself? With pleasure--and she takes a header!
He explains that courtesy forbids him to keep a lady waiting, and
follows her example! So both are drowned, and all ends happily!

And this is the plot! And what about the characters? _Rebecca_ is
merely a hysterical old maid, who would have been set right, in
the time of the Tudors, with a sound ducking; and nowadays, had
she consulted a fashionable physician, she would have been probably
ordered a sea-voyage, and a diet free from stimulants. The Pastor is
a feeble, fickle fool, who seemingly has had but one sensible idea in
his life. He has believed his wife to be mad, and, considering that
she married him, his faith in the matter rested upon evidence of an
entirely convincing nature. The _Rector Kroll_ is a prig and a bore
of the first water. When he discovers _Rebecca's_ perfidy, he suggests
that she may have inherited her proneness for treachery from her
father--and, to her distressed astonishment, he gives the name of a
gentleman, not hitherto recognised by her as a parent! The best line
in the piece, to my mind--and it certainly "went with a roar"--is a
question of the housekeeper--answered in the negative--"Have you ever
seen the Pastor laugh?" Laugh! with such surroundings! Pretentious
twaddle, that would be repulsively immoral were it less idiotic. And
_so_ dull!