The education of Agnes had been one which rendered her whole system peculiarly sensitive and impressible to all influences from the invisible and unseen.  Of this education we shall speak more particularly hereafter.  At present we see her sitting in the twilight on the moss-grown marble parapet, her distaff, with its silvery flax, lying idly in her hands, and her widening dark eyes gazing intently into the gloomy gorge below, from which arose the far-off complaining babble of the brook at the bottom and the shiver and sigh of evening winds through the trailing ivy.  The white mist was slowly rising, wavering, undulating, and creeping its slow way up the sides of the gorge.  Now it hid a tuft of foliage, and now it wreathed itself around a horned clump of aloes, and, streaming far down below it in the dimness, made it seem like the goblin robe of some strange, supernatural being.

The evening light had almost burned out in the sky:  only a band of vivid red lay low in the horizon out to sea, and the round full moon was just rising like a great silver lamp, while Vesuvius with its smoky top began in the obscurity to show its faintly flickering fires.  A vague agitation seemed to oppress the child; for she sighed deeply, and often repeated with fervor the Ave Maria.

At this moment there began to rise from the very depths of the gorge below her the sound of a rich tenor voice, with a slow, sad modulation, and seeming to pulsate upward through the filmy, shifting mists.  It was one of those voices which seem fit to be the outpouring of some spirit denied all other gifts of expression, and rushing with passionate fervor through this one gate of utterance.  So distinctly were the words spoken, that they seemed each one to rise as with a separate intelligence out of the mist, and to knock at the door of the heart.

  Sad is my life, and lonely! 
  No hope for me,
  Save thou, my love, my only,
  I see!

  Where art then, O my fairest? 
  Where art thou gone? 
  Dove of the rock, I languish
  Alone!

  They say thou art so saintly,
  Who dare love thee? 
  Yet bend thine eyelids holy
  On me!

  Though heaven alone possess thee,
  Thou dwell’st above,
  Yet heaven, didst thou but know it,
  Is love.

There was such an intense earnestness in these sounds, that large tears gathered in the wide, dark eyes, and fell one after another upon the sweet alyssum and maiden’s-hair that grew in the crevices of the marble wall.  She shivered and drew away from the parapet, and thought of stories she had heard the nuns tell of wandering spirits who sometimes in lonesome places pour forth such entrancing music as bewilders the brain of the unwary listener, and leads him to some fearful destruction.

“Agnes!” said the sharp voice of old Elsie, appearing at the door,—­“here! where are you?”

“Here, grandmamma.”

“Who’s that singing this time o’ night?”