e
addressed to her; she tried to read them, but the words danced before her
eyes, and she was forced to lay them aside. She took up a little packet
containing hair cut from the heads of her sons after death, and a lock of
her husband's. She gazed on these dear memorials with rapt tenderness,
and now the poppy juice began to take effect: the images of those
departed ones rose clear in her mind, and she was as near to them as
though they were standing in living actuality by her side.

Still holding the curls in her hand, she looked up into vacancy, trying
to apprehend clearly what had occurred within the last few hours and what
lay before her: She must leave this room, this ample couch, this
house--all, in short, that was bound up with the dearest memories of
those she had loved. She was to be forced to this--but did it beseem her
to submit to this Negro, this stranger in the house where she was
mistress? She shook her head with a scornful smile; then opening a glass
phial, which was still half-full of opium pillules, she placed a few on
her tongue and again gazed sky-wards.--Another face now looked down on
her; she saw the husband from whom not even death could divide her, and
at his feet their two murdered sons. Presently Orion seemed to rise out
of the clouds, as a diver comes up from the water, and make for the shore
of the island on which George and the other two seemed to be standing.
His father opened his arms to receive him and clasped him to his heart,
while she herself--or was it only her wraith--went to the others, who
hurried forward to greet her tenderly; and then her husband, too, met
her, and she found rest on his bosom.

For hours, and long before the incursion of the Arabs, she had been
feeling half stunned and her mind clouded; but now a delicious,
slumberous lethargy came over her, to which her whole being urged her to
yield. But every time her eyes closed, the thought of the morrow shot
through her brain, and finally, with a great effort, she sat up, took
some water--which was always close at hand--shook into it the remaining
pillules in the bottle, and drank it off to the very last drop.

Her hand was steady; the happy smile on her lips, and the eager
expression of her eyes, might have led a spectator to believe that she
was thirsty and had mixed herself a refreshing draught. She had no look
of a desperate creature laying violent hands on her own life; she felt no
hesitancy, no fear of death, no bur