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106 —but I cannot tell you—the lonely wailing of the wind through the deserted chambers—I have started as from a human voice in its last extremity of anguish; and even now, I ask, is there no omen and no sympathy in sounds so like our own moan of pain—our own cry of despair? Who may say that the invisible is also the inaudible—or if the dead and the spirit world wait not in upper air?"

"I fear," returned his sister, wishing to break in upon the thread of his gloomy imaginings, "that we should find our old dwelling uninhabitable."

"And even were it not so, there, at least, I could never dwell again," interrupted Guido. "As I sat beside our favourite springs and wandered through our old accustomed walks, I was haunted with the perpetual presence of change—and the worst of all change, that in myself. I sat beside the fountain, over which the old chestnut flung its shade, itself golden with the sun; the blue violets looked out from their large leaves, and twined round the shattered marble of the wall, yet so graceful with the carved nymphs and gods from whom I had years ago cleared the moss;—there I sat, even as I had done but the very summer before—all, to the one sunbeam touching