was not glad, not even cheerful.  It went to her heart, and yet it was not mournful-not in the least like the passionate lament of Isis for Osiris, or that of Demeter bewailing her daughter.  The emotion it aroused in her was a sweetly sorrowful compassion, which included herself, her brothers, her father, her lover, all who were doomed to suffering and death, even the utter stranger, for whom she had hitherto felt no sympathy.

And the compassion bore within it a sense of comfort which she could not explain, or perhaps would not inquire into.  It struck her, too, now and then, that the strain had a ring as of thanksgiving.  It was, no doubt, addressed to the 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.”