s were often turned
upon her with a staring scrutiny, with the morose and almost violent
expression that is the child of frustrated curiosity.

Was it true? Was she in real life, or sitting there, watching, thinking,
striving to endure, in a dream? Since the accident which had for ever
changed her life she had felt many sensations, a torrent of sensations,
but never one exactly like this, never one so full of emptiness, chaos,
grey vacancy, eternal stillness, unreal oppression and almost magical
solitude as this. She had thought she had suffered all things that she
could suffer. She had not yet suffered this. Someone, the Governing
Power, had held this in reserve. Now it was being sent forth by decree.
Now it was coming upon her. Now it was enveloping her. Now it was
rolling round her and billowing away on every side to unimaginably
remote horizons.

Another and a new emotion of horror was to be hers. Would the attack of
the hidden one upon her never end? Was that quiver of poisoned arrows
inexhaustible?

She leaned back against the cushions without feeling them. She wanted to
sink back as the mortally wounded sink, to sink down, far down, into the
gulf where surely the dying go to find, with their freezing lips, the
frozen lips of Death. She shut her eyes.

Presently, with the faint splash of the oars in the water, there mingled
a low sound of music. The rower nearest to her was singing in an
under voice to keep his boy's heart from succumbing to the spell of
melancholy. She listened, still wrapped in this dreadful chaos that
was dreamlike. At first the music was a murmur. But presently it
grew louder. She could distinguish words now and then. Once she heard
_carissima_, a moment afterwards _amore_. Then the poison in which the
tip of this last arrow had been curiously steeped began its work in
her. The quivering creature hidden within her cowered, shrank, put up
trembling hands, cried out, "I cannot endure this thing. I do not know
how to. I have never learnt the way. This is impossible for me. This is
a demand I have not the capacity to fulfil!" And, even while it cowered
and cried out, knew, "This I must endure. This demand I shall be made
to fulfil. Nothing will serve me; no outstretched hands, no wailings of
despair, no prayers, no curses even will save me. For I am the soul in
the hands of the vivisector."

Along the lake, past the old home of La Taglioni, past the Villa Pasta
with its long garden, past lit