gods, and for that reason it appealed to her, and
she would gladly have joined in it, for she, too, was grateful to the
immortals, and above all to Eros, for the love which had been born
in her heart and had found such an ardent return. She sighed as she
listened to every note of the chant, and it worked upon her like a
healing draught.

The struggle of her will against bodily fatigue, and finally against the
mental exhaustion of so much bliss, the conviction that her heavy,
weary feet would perhaps fail to carry her home, and that she must seek
shelter somewhere for the night, had disturbed her greatly. Now she
was quite calm, and as much at ease as she was at home sitting with her
father, her stitching in her hand, while she dreamed of her mother and
her childhood in the past. The singing had fallen on her agitated soul
like the oil poured by the mariner on the sea to still the foaming
breakers. She felt it so.

She could not help thinking of the time when she could fall asleep on
her mother's bosom in the certainty that tender love was watching over
her. The happiness of childhood, when she loved everything she knew-her
family, the slaves, her father's birds, the flowers in the little
garden, the altar of the goddess to whom she made offering, the very
stars in the sky-seemed to come over her, and there she sat in dreamy
lassitude, her head on her lover's shoulder, till the last stragglers of
the procession, who, were women, many of them carrying little lamps in
their hands, had almost all gone past.

Then she suddenly felt an eager jerk in the shoulder on which her head
was resting.

"Look--look there!" he whispered; and as her eyes followed the direction
of his finger, she too started, and exclaimed, "Korinna!--Did you know
her?"

"She had often come to my father's garden," he replied, "and I saw her
portrait in Alexander's room. These are souls from Hades that we have
seen. We must offer sacrifice, for those to whom they show themselves
they draw after them." At this Melissa, too, shuddered, and exclaimed
in horror: "O Diodoros, not to death! We will ask the priests to-morrow
morning what sacrifice may redeem us. Anything rather than the grave
and the darkness of Hades!--Come, I am strong again now. Let us get away
from hence and go home."

"But we must go through the gate now," replied the youth. "It is not
well to follow in the footsteps of the dead."

Melissa, however, insisted on going on through the