She had gone, almost promising to return and bring her husband to Yewridge Hall. Minna, back again in her own house, went straight to her den, threw aside her hat and gloves, sat down in a chair directly in front of the bust--the work of her own hands--and looked intently at it, interrogating it, entreating it. So sad--so unspeakably sad and grieved--that girl’s face! So firm, so bright, so apparently untouched by grief or care, untroubled by any wish save for power, and conscious pleasure in possessing a great deal of it, that of the woman! Yet the cold marble, with the look of one who was sad unto death, was not really as lifeless as the living woman, who smiled and talked and spoke brightly and took a superficial interest in all that was going on. Minna started, and her eyes dilated. Had she at last got the clue to the transformation? What were the words that tried to take shape in her mind as she looked at the immovable marble, and thought of the marble endowed with life now on her way to London? The name of an old play, the words of some old proverb--‘Killing no Murder.’ ‘That is it!’ she exclaimed aloud, and then, looking again and again at the sweet sad lips which she herself had carved, she said in a whisper to herself: ‘No, it is worse than that; it is murder no killing! That is the answer to the enigma; I know it is. It was her own mother who did it. Oh, horrible, horrible! She murdered, without killing her! Her soul is dead--that’s what it is--poor little Fulvia’s beautiful soul and warm, beating heart--murdered; while her body and her brain are left to live on alone. How I used to wonder, just after she was married, how it would end, what turn it would take with her--crush her, or harden her, or kill her! It has been the moral death. She is murdered, and is yet living.’ There are moments in the lives of most of us in which some great truth comes home to us with overpowering force. It may be uttered by other lips, and may from them strike straight into our souls, as the answer to some strange and puzzling problem over which we have been brooding. The sight of a picture; the notes of a song, or of some instrument of music; the prospect of clouds in the heaven, or rain sweeping across the fields; the wail of the wind on a stormy day or night: any or all of these may, with a lightning-quick flash of intuition, crystallize the idea which has been floating in a state of solution in our minds. Such intuitions have the value of spiritual revelations--they are beyond proof; they may even be disproved theoretically--they can never be the less true and real to those who have experienced them; and although every voice on earth should uplift itself and pronounce them false, it were useless. He or she who has been thus, as it were, smitten in the face, in the heart, and in the soul, by one of these flashes of spiritual insight, never more has the power to disbelieve it.