Page:Stories after Nature.pdf/30

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6
JULIA AND LYSIUS.

"I am afraid my daughter will die in consequence." Lysius replied, "It grieves me; but we must part here." So saying, he took horse and went to Athens.

Now when Julia's father told this, she stifled much of her grief, seeing his great pain for her; called to aid an independence of spirit, and for some time made a desperate head against her affliction: stifling her tears and sighs, and groaning but seldom, and in secret, at her hard fate. But her father saw what was passing in her heart, and was miserable. The days and nights proved too long for her, and she went mad for many months. She sat half in her grave, and half out; and it was the falling of an autumnal leaf whether she lived or died. But the violence of the fever abating, her senses gradually returned. As nature mouldeth to its sweetest shape after a wasteful storm, so she gathered her reason, and, because of her father, made great efforts towards her peace. Three years passed over her head, yet she was nothing altered; save in declining to her last bed by fast degrees.

Her father, seeking by all means to amuse her mind, had built a cell behind a buttress close where he held his seat in the court of justice, and provided it with curtains, so that she could see and hear all that passed of interest, without