Her only life was, that she was lost. Her whole
consciousness was merest, all but abstract, loss.

Then came the form of her mother, and bent over that of her brother
from behind. "Another ghost of a ghost! another shadow of a phantom!"
she said to herself. "She is nothing to me. If I speak to her, she is
not there. Shall I pour out my soul into the ear of a mist, a fume from
my own brain? Oh, cold creatures, ye are not what ye seem, and I will
none of you!"

With that, came her father, and stood beside the others, gazing upon
her with still, cold eyes, expressing only a pale quiet. She bowed her
face on her hands, and would not regard him. Even if he were alive, her
heart was past being moved. It was settled into stone. The universe was
sunk in one of the dreams that haunt the sleep of death; and, if these
were ghosts at all, they were ghosts walking in their sleep.

But the dead, one of them seized one of her hands, and another the
other. They raised her to her feet, and led her along, and her brother
walked before. Thus was she borne away captive of her dead, neither
willing nor unwilling, of life and death equally careless. Through the
moonlight they led her from the city, and over fields, and through
valleys, and across rivers and seas--a long journey; nor did she grow
weary, for there was not life enough in her to be made weary. The dead
never spoke to her, and she never spoke to them. Sometimes it seemed as
if they spoke to each other, but, if it were so, it concerned some
shadowy matter, no more to her than the talk of grasshoppers in the
field, or of beetles that weave their much-involved dances on the face
of the pool. Their voices were even too thin and remote to rouse her to
listen.

They came at length to a great mountain, and, as they were going up the
mountain, light began to grow, as if the sun were beginning to rise.
But she cared as little for the sun that was to light the day as for
the moon that had lighted the night, and closed her eyes, that she
might cover her soul with her eyelids.

Of a sudden a great splendor burst upon her, and through her eyelids
she was struck blind--blind with light and not with darkness, for all
was radiance about her. She was like a fish in a sea of light. But she
neither loved the light nor mourned the shadow.

Then were her ears invaded with a confused murmur, as of the mingling
of all sweet sounds of the earth--of wind and water, of bird and voice,
of string an