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 d the ascent.

Above the falls and close to them, she sat down upon a rock; a slight, drooping figure, whose dejected pose told of a broken heart.

Before her, almost at her feet, the pent-up river was widened to a vast flood. Here and there a half- submerged pine lifted its crown above it; the surface was ruffled by the wind, and white-crested waves were rolling among the green tree-tops. She looked with indifference upon the scene. She had not heard that the Bridge had fallen, and was, of course, ignorant of these new cascades; and they did not impress her as being strange.

Her whole life was broken up; all the world ap peared shattered by the blow that had fallen on her, and nothing could startle her now. She felt dimly that some stupendous catastrophe had taken place; yet it did not appear unnatural. A strange sense of unreality possessed her; everything seemed an illu sion, as if she were a shadow in a land of shadows. The thought came to her that she was dead, and that her spirit was passing over the dim ghost trail to the shadow-land. She tried to shake off the fancy, but all was so vague and dreamlike that she hardly knew where or what she was; yet over it all brooded the consciousness of dull, heavy, torturing pain, like the dumb agony that comes to us in fevered sleep, burdening our dreams with a black oppressing weight of horror.

Her hand, hanging listlessly at her side, touched her flute, which was still suspended from her belt by the golden chain. She raised it to her lips, but only a faint inharmonious note came from it. The music seemed gone from the flute, as hope was gone from