In the morning he happened to be a little
late in entering the school-room. There was something between the leaves of
the Virgil that lay upon his desk. He opened it and saw a freshly gathered
mountain-flower. He looked at Elsie, instinctively, involuntarily. She had
another such flower on her breast.
A young girl's graceful compliment,--that is all,--no doubt,--no doubt. It
was odd that the flower should have happened to be laid between the leaves
of the Fourth Book of the "AEneid," and at this line,--
"Incipit effari, mediaque in voce resistit."
A remembrance of an ancient superstition flashed through the master's mind,
and he determined to try the _Sortes Virgilianae_. He shut the volume, and
opened it again at a venture.--The story of Laocooen!
He read, with a strange feeling of unwilling fascination, from "_Horresco
referens_" to "_Bis medium amplexi_," and flung the book from him, as if
its leaves had been steeped in the subtle poisons that princes die of.
* * * * *
THE SPHINX'S CHILDREN.
"Que la volonte soit le destin!"
Long had she sat, crouched upon her breast,--crouched, but not for slumber
or for spring. No slumber gloomed darkly in those broad, sad eyes; no dream
indefinably softened the lips, whose patient outline breathed only
wakefulness and expectation,--a long-deferred, yet constant expectation,--a
hope that would have been despair, save that it was just within hope's
limits,--a monotonous, reiterate, indestructible chord in the creature's
mystic existence, that, once struck by some mighty, shrouded Hand of Power,
still reverberated, and trailed its still renewing echoes through every
fibre of its secret habitation.
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