ternal duty by affecting false stoical
serenity:--to nurse her soul's strength, and suckle her womanly weakness
with the tsars which are poison--when repressed; to be at peace with a
disastrous world for the sake of the dependent 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 be