And she had turned away silently, uncomplainingly, from her flight to distant realms, to the telescope, and with a warm, swelling heart that would have embraced a world, had busied herself with analyzing microscopic organizations. Thus, in the course of long years, she had grown used to suppress emotions such as she experienced to-day, and they seldom came to the surface, just as the bells of the sunken city are only heard above the sea on Sunday. To-day was not Sunday, but it was an anniversary. Ten years ago to-day she had been sent to her first and only party,--her father had almost killed her,--and the whole current of her life had been changed. She knew the date perfectly, for the next day was the anniversary of her father's death. The familiar forms of those days hovered around her; they were the only ones that had ever approached her nearly, for since that time she had had no intimate relations with any one. She had studied mankind, but human beings were strangers to her. And as she thought and pondered, she wished herself again the child that ran races with the wind and cradled herself among the storm-tossed boughs. Oh for one breath of hopeful childhood, one throb of that love-thirsty heart, one tear of that wrestling faith! All dead and silent now, every blossom of childhood and youth faded: a woman, old at two-and-twenty, looking down from the heights of passionless contemplation upon a life, lying behind her, that she has never enjoyed, upon a time, now past, that she has never lived. Sighing, she turned away from the sunny landscape. "Our life lasts seventy--perhaps eighty--years," she said to herself, "and the delight of it is labour and trouble." This reading, by a great modern philosopher, of the golden words of the ancient writings, she had adopted as her motto, and it still possessed its old charm for her. What more could she desire of life than labour and trouble? What could youth or age bring her beyond these? She turned away from the window, and quickly arranged in thick braids around her head her loosened hair which had fallen down like a black veil. Her glance, as she did so, fell only passingly and indifferently upon the mirror. She never saw the face that gazed at her from its depths,--a face as faultlessly beautiful as an artist's fancy pictures those dark, melancholy female forms with which the ancients peopled the night. She dressed herself in simple white, and then her arms dropped wearied at her side. The expression of strength that the word labour had called into her face gave way to a profound melancholy, almost despair, and she sank exhausted upon a couch. She sat still for one moment, her head sunk upon her breast, and then the large tears rolled down her cheeks. "Labour is a delight, when one has strength for it--but I have none!" she said, clasping her knees with her small, transparent hands, while she gazed despairingly towards the distant horizon.