declivity reached the woman's
ear but as a shrivelled and intermittent recitative. Yet scarcely a
single accent among the many afloat to-night could have such power to
impress a listener with thoughts of its origin. One inwardly saw the
infinity of those combined multitudes; and perceived that each of the
tiny trumpets was seized on, entered, scoured and emerged from by the
wind as thoroughly as if it were as vast as a crater.

"The spirit moved them." A meaning of the phrase forced itself upon
the attention; and an emotional listener's fetichistic mood might have
ended in one of more advanced quality. It was not, after all, that
the left-hand expanse of old blooms spoke, or the right-hand, or those
of the slope in front; but it was the single person of something else
speaking through each at once.

Suddenly, on the barrow, there mingled with all this wild rhetoric
of night a sound which modulated so naturally into the rest that its
beginning and ending were hardly to be distinguished. The bluffs, and
the bushes, and the heather-bells had broken silence; at last, so did
the woman; and her articulation was but as another phrase of the same
discourse as theirs. Thrown out on the winds it became twined in with
them, and with them it flew away.

What she uttered was a lengthened sighing, apparently at something in
her mind which had led to her presence here. There was a spasmodic
abandonment about it as if, in allowing herself to utter the sound.
the woman's brain had authorized what it could not regulate. One
point was evident in this; that she had been existing in a suppressed
state, and not in one of languor, or stagnation.

Far away down the valley the faint shine from the window of the inn
still lasted on; and a few additional moments proved that the window,
or what was within it, had more to do with the woman's sigh than had
either her own actions or the scene immediately around. She lifted
her left hand, which held a closed telescope. This she rapidly
extended, as if she were well accustomed to the operation, and raising
it to her eye directed it towards the light beaming from the inn.

The handkerchief which had hooded her head was now a little thrown
back, her face being somewhat elevated. A profile was visible against
the dull monochrome of cloud around her; and it was as though side
shadows from the features of Sappho and Mrs. Siddons had converged
upwards from the tomb to form an image like neither but sug