The light was failing
and everything beginning to grow dark around her. She gazed wide-eyed
and unblinkingly straight at the sun.
Still wandering about here and there, crying and wailing, she would
have frightened any listener, for her voice now uttered rare notes such
as are not often produced in the human throat. In a night of roaring
tempest, when the whirling winds beat with invisible wings against
the crowding shadows that ride upon it, if you should find yourself
in a solitary and ruined building, you would hear moans and sighs
which you might suppose to be the soughing of the wind as it beats
on the high towers and moldering walls to fill you with terror and
make you shudder in spite of yourself; as mournful as those unknown
sounds of the dark night when the tempest roars were the accents of
that mother. In this condition night came upon her. Perhaps Heaven
had granted some hours of sleep while the invisible wing of an angel,
brushing over her pallid countenance, might wipe out the sorrows
from her memory; perhaps such suffering was too great for weak human
endurance, and Providence had intervened with its sweet remedy,
forgetfulness.
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