t life
unborn; lay such pure efforts she clung to God. Soft dreams of sacred
nuptial tenderness, tragic images, wild pity, were like phantoms
encircling her, plucking at her as she went, lest they were beneath her
feet, and she kept them from lodging between her breasts. The thought
that her husband, though he should have perished, was not a life lost
if their child lived, sustained her powerfully. It seemed to whisper at
times almost as it were Carlo's ghost breathing in her ears: "On thee!"
On her the further duty devolved; and she trod down hope, lest it should
build her up and bring a shock to surprise her fortitude; she put back
alarm.

The mountains and the valleys scarce had names for her understanding;
they were but a scene where the will of her Maker was at work. Rarely
has a soul been so subjected to its own force. She certainly had the
image of God in her mind.

Yet when her ayes lingered on any mountain gorge, the fate of her
husband sang within it a strange chant, ending in a key that rang
sounding through all her being, and seemed to question heaven. This
music framed itself; it was still when she looked at the shrouded
mountain-tops. A shadow meting sunlight on the long green slopes aroused
it, and it hummed above the tumbling hasty foam, and penetrated hanging
depths of foliage, sad-hued rock-clefts, dark green ravines; it became
convulsed where the mountain threw forward in a rushing upward line
against the sky, there to be severed at the head by cloud. It was silent
among the vines.

Most painfully did human voices affect her when she had this music;
speech was a scourge to her sense of hearing, and touch distressed her:
an edge of purple flame would then unfold the vision of things to
her eyes. She had lost memory; and if by hazard unawares one idea was
projected by some sudden tumult of her enslaved emotions beyond known
and visible circumstances, her intelligence darkened with am oppressive
dread like that of zealots of the guilt of impiety.

Thus destitute, her eye took innumerable pictures sharp as on a
brass-plate: torrents, goat-tracks winding up red earth, rocks veiled
with water, cottage and children, strings of villagers mounting to the
church, one woman kneeling before a wayside cross, her basket at
her back, and her child gazing idly by; perched hamlets, rolling
pasture-fields, the vast mountain lines. She asked all that she saw,
"Does he live?" but the life was out of everything, and