hy, since heart can speak to heart, though the thin, fixed lips
have sealed their secret well. Sad mother, whose rose of life was
crushed before it had budded, tender young lips that had drunk the cup
of sorrow to the dregs, while their cup of bliss should hardly yet be
brimmed for life's sweet springtime, your crumbling fanes and broken
arches and prostrate columns lie not among the ruins of Time. Be
comforted of that. They witness of a more pitiless Destroyer, and by
this token I know there shall dawn a brighter day. The God of the
fatherless and the widow, of the worse than widowed and fatherless, the
Avenger of the Slaughter of the Innocents, be with you, and shield and
shelter and bless!

But the overture wavers to its close, and her soul hears far off the
voice of the coming Spirit. A deeper light shines in the strangely
introverted eyes,--the look as of one listening intently to a distant
melody which no one else can hear,--the look of one to whom the room
and the people and the presence are but a dream, and past and future
centre on the far-off song. Slowly she raises her instrument. I
almost shudder to see the tawny wood touching her white shoulder; yet
that cannot be common or unclean which she so loves and carries with
almost a caress. Still intent, she raises the bow with a slow sweep,
as were a wand of divination. Nearer and nearer comes the heavenly
voice, pouring around her a flood of mystic melody. And now at last it
breaks upon our ears,--softly at first, only a sweet faint echo from
that other sphere, but deepening, strengthening, conquering,--now
rising on the swells of a controlling passion, now sinking into the
depths with its low wail of pain; exultant, scornful, furious, in the
glad outburst of opening joy and the fierce onslaught of strength;
crowned, sceptred, glorious in garland and singing-robes, throned in
the high realms of its inheritance, a kingdom of boundless scope and
ever new delights: then sweeping down through the lower world with
diminishing rapture, rapture lessening into astonishment, astonishment
dying into despair, it gathers up the passion and the pain, the blight
and woe and agony; all garnered joys are scattered. Evil supplants the
good. Hope dies, love pales, and faith is faint and wan. But every
death has its moaning ghost, pale spectre of vanished loves. Oh,
fearful revenge of the outraged soul! The mysterious, uncomprehended,
incomprehensible soul! The i