The poor fellow by whom it had been painted was one to whom years before Dame Elsie had given food and shelter for many months during a lingering illness; and he had painted so much of his dying heart and hopes into it that it had a peculiar and vital vividness in its power of affecting the feelings.  Agnes had been familiar with this picture from early infancy.  No day of her life had the flowers failed to be freshly placed before it.  It had seemed to smile down sympathy on her childish joys, and to cloud over with her childish sorrows.  It was less a picture to her than a presence; and the whole air of the little orange-garden seemed to be made sacred by it.  When she had arranged her flowers, she kneeled down and began to say prayers for the soul of the young gallant.

“Holy Jesus,” she said, “he is young, rich, handsome, and a king’s brother; and for all these things the Fiend may tempt him to forget his God and throw away his soul.  Holy Mother, give him good counsel!”

“Come, child, to your supper,” said Dame Elsie.  “I have milked the goats, and everything is ready.”

CHAPTER III.

The gorge.

After her light supper was over, Agnes took her distaff, wound with shining white flax, and went and seated herself in her favorite place, on the low parapet that overlooked the gorge.

This ravine, with its dizzy depths, its waving foliage, its dripping springs, and the low murmur of the little stream that pursued its way far down at the bottom, was one of those things which stimulated her impressible imagination, and filled her with a solemn and vague delight.  The ancient Italian tradition made it the home of fauns and dryads, wild woodland creatures, intermediate links between vegetable life and that of sentient and reasoning humanity.  The more earnest faith that came in with Christianity, if it had its brighter lights in an immortality of blessedness, had also its deeper shadows in the intenser perceptions it awakened of sin and evil, and of the mortal struggle by which the human spirit must avoid endless woe and rise to endless felicity.  The myths with which the colored Italian air was filled in mediaeval ages no longer resembled those graceful, floating, cloud-like figures one sees in the ancient chambers of Pompeii,—­the bubbles and rainbows of human fancy, rising aimless and buoyant, with a mere freshness of animal life, against a black background of utter and hopeless ignorance as to man’s past or future.  They were rather expressed by solemn images of mournful, majestic angels and of triumphant saints, or fearful, warning presentations of loathsome fiends.  Each lonesome gorge and sombre dell had tales no more of tricky fauns and dryads, but of those restless, wandering demons who, having lost their own immortality of blessedness, constantly lie in wait to betray frail humanity, and cheat it of that glorious inheritance bought by the Great Redemption.