Mary sighed. "And this woman," she thought, "has yet lost her husband, she has lost her love forever, and yet is happy! Could I ever be happy again if I lost mine?" She would have liked to have asked her a question yet dared not. She wondered whether the widow was happy because she knew she would meet her love in another world. "She could not be happy unless she believed this. How sweet must be the lives of such as this woman, so full of love and joy, which even death, they believe, cannot destroy. How different," she thought, "from the agony, the despair, of those like me who know no world but this, who, when their loved ones are taken from them, lose them for ever. Ah, the hopelessness of it!" She felt that she was alone in the world, altogether cut out from the innocent joys and beliefs, for she had tasted the fruits of that poisonous tree of knowledge. At last she said, "Music generally raises one curious idea to me, not altogether sad but so strange. That last piece did not raise that idea though, but made me feel wonderfully glad while it lasted." "And what is it that most music suggests to you then?" asked Mrs. White. "It is very curious. It makes me feel as if I was all alone, far away somewhere, apart from other beings, and that all else was nothing but a series of pictures passing by me. Did you ever read Greek plays, Mrs. White?" "Dear me! no! never. Why, you don't mean to say that Greek too was one of your studies?" "No! but my aunt has read me translations of some of the Greek plays, and she explained to me the spirit of them. I often feel when I am listening to music as if I was the central figure of one of those old tragedies, a being hunted by a relentless fate; and sometimes it seems as if all that comes across me in life were incidents and characters in the play--characters subsidiary to mine, instruments of the Fate which is the key-note of the play, some knowingly, some unknowingly. Those who harm me will not be punished, those who are kind to me will not be rewarded; they are but the blind tools of the same Destiny. For in my play there is not, as in modern plays and novels, a retributive justice setting all things right at the end, but this pitiless Fate, careless of anyone. It is a fearful fancy and it seems to haunt me." She said this in a languid dreamy way, beating the sides of the sofa nervously with her thin fingers as she spoke. The idea was a common one of hers, and as she said, haunted her, with many others of like nature, born of that most pernicious habit of self-introspection which her recent education had inculcated.