She turned from the Pagan, knelt down
by the grave, and pressed her face and bosom against the little mound of
turf beneath her.
No voice comforted her, no arm caressed her, as her mind now began to
penetrate the mysteries, to probe the darkest depths of the long night's
calamities! Unaided and unsolaced, while the few and waning stars
glimmered from their places in the sky, while the sublime stillness of
tranquillised Nature stretched around her, she knelt at the altar of
death, and raised her soul upward to the great heaven above her, charged
with its sacred offering of human grief!
Long did she thus remain; and when at length she arose from the ground,
when, approaching the Pagan, she fixed on him her tearless, dreary eyes,
he quailed before her glance, as his dull faculties struggled vainly to
resume the old, informing power that they had now for ever lost.
Nothing but the remembrance aroused by his first sight of the fragment
of the lute lived within even yet, as he whispered to her in low,
entreating tones--
'Come home--come home! Your father may return before us--come home!'
As the words 'home' and 'father'--those household gods of the heart's
earliest existence--struck upon her ears, a change flashed with electric
suddenness over the girl's whole aspect.
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