FUTURITY.
A few days later Hermia had a singular experience. Bessie’s youngest
child, her only boy, died. Hermia carried her sister from the room as
the boy breathed his last, and laid her on a bed. As Bessie lay sobbing
and moaning, sometimes wailing aloud, she seemed suddenly to fade from
her sister’s vision. Hermia was alone, where she could not tell, in a
room whose lineaments were too shadowy to define. Even her own outlines,
seen as in a mirror held above, were blurred. Of one thing only was she
sharply conscious: she was writhing in mortal agony—agony not of the
body, but of the spirit. The cause she did not grasp, but the effect was
a suffering as exquisite and as torturing as that of vitriol poured upon
bare nerves. The insight lasted only a few seconds, but it was so real
that she almost screamed aloud. Then she drifted back to the present and
bent over her sister. But her face was white. In that brief interval her
inner vision had pierced the depths of her nature, and what it saw there
made her shudder.
* * * * *