were not without their influence in attracting a lonely heart deprived of the support of natural ties.  The Princess longed for something to love, and the discovery of a legitimate object of family affection was an event in the weary monotony of her life; and therefore it was that the hours of the afternoon seemed long while she looked forth towards Rome, listening to the ceaseless chiming of its bells, and wondering why no one appeared along the road.

The sun went down, and all the wide plain seemed like the sea at twilight, lying in rosy and lilac and purple shadowy bands, out of which rose the old city, solemn and lonely as some enchanted island of dream-land, with a flush of radiance behind it and a tolling of weird music filling all the air around.  Now they are chanting the Ave Maria in hundreds of churches, and the Princess worships in distant accord, and tries to still the anxieties of her heart with many a prayer.  Twilight fades and fades, the Campagna becomes a black sea, and the distant city looms up like a dark rock against the glimmering sky, and the Princess goes within and walks restlessly through the wide halls, stopping first at one open window and then at another to listen.  Beneath her feet she treads a cool mosaic pavement where laughing Cupids are dancing.  Above, from the ceiling, Aurora and the Hours look down in many-colored clouds of brightness.  The sound of the fountains without is so clear in the intense stillness that the peculiar voice of each one can be told.  That is the swaying noise of the great jet that rises from marble shells and falls into a wide basin, where silvery swans swim round and round in enchanted circles; and the other slenderer sound is the smaller jet that rains down its spray into the violet-borders deep in the shrubbery; and that other, the shallow babble of the waters that go down the marble steps to the lake.  How dreamlike and plaintive they all sound in the night stillness!  The nightingale sings from the dark shadows of the wilderness; and the musky odors of the cyclamen come floating ever and anon through the casement, in that strange, cloudy way in which flower-scents seem to come and go in the air in the night season.

At last the Princess fancies she hears the distant tramp of horses’ feet, and her heart beats so that she can scarcely listen:  now she hears it,—­and now a rising wind, sweeping across the Campagna, seems to bear it moaning away.  She goes to a door and looks out into the darkness.  Yes, she hears it now, quick and regular,—­the beat of many horses’ feet coming in hot haste along the road.  Surely the few servants whom she has sent cannot make all this noise! and she trembles with vague affright.  Perhaps it is a tyrannical message, bringing imprisonment and death.  She calls a maid, and bids her bring lights into the reception-hall.  A few moments more, and there is a confused stamping of horses’ feet approaching the house, and she hears the voices of her servants.  She runs into the piazza, and sees dismounting a knight who carries Agnes in his arms pale and fainting.  Old Elsie and Monica, too, dismount, with the Princess’s men-servants; but, wonderful to tell, there seems besides them to be a train of some hundred armed horsemen.