none but radiant and
frolicsome faces, and no sound but triumphant revelry.

Fatigue was forgotten; it might have been supposed that the sinister
sisters, Care and Sorrow, had been banished from earth.

There was a smile even on Melissa's sweet, calm face. At first her old
friend's audacious jest had offended her maidenly coyness; but if
Diodoros had always loved her, so had she always loved him; and as other
well-conducted girls had been content to have the like done to them, and
her companion so confidently and roguishly sued for pardon, she gave him
a smile which filled his heart with rapture, and said more than words.

It was a comfort, too, to sit still and rest.

She spoke but little, but even she forgot what troubled her when she felt
her friend's hand on hers, and he whispered to her that this was the most
delightful night he had ever known, and that, of all the sweets the gods
had created, she was to him the sweetest?

The blue sea spread before them, the full moon mirrored on its scarcely
heaving surface like a tremulous column of pure and shining silver. The
murmur of the ripples came up from the strand as soothing and inviting as
the song of the Nereids; and if a white crest of foam rose on a wave, she
could fancy it was the arm of Thetis or Galatea. There, where the blue
was deepest, the sea-god Glaukos must dwell, and his heart be gladdened
by the merry doings on shore.

Nature is so great; and as the thought came to her that her heart was not
too small to take its greatness in, even to the farthest horizon, it
filled her with glad surprise.

And Nature was bountiful too. Melissa could see the happy and gracious
face of a divinity in everything she looked upon. The immortals who had
afflicted her, and whom she had often bitterly accused, could be kind and
merciful too. The sea, on whose shining surface the blue vault of heaven
with the moon and stars rocked and twinkled, the soft breeze which fanned
her brow, the new delicious longing which filled her heart-all she felt
and was conscious of, was a divinity or an emanation of the divine.
Mighty Poseidon and majestic Zeus, gentle Selene, and the sportive
children of the god of winds, seemed to be strangely near her as she rode
along. And it was the omnipotent son of Kypris, no doubt, who stirred her
heart to beat higher than it had ever done before.

Her visit to her mother's grave, too, her prayer and her offerings there,
had perhaps moved the spir