These thoughts swelled in silence in the mind of Elsie, while she was busy sorting and arranging her household stores, and making those thousand-and-one preparations known to every householder, whether of much or little, who meditates a long journey.

To Agnes she seemed more than ever severe and hard; yet probably there never was a time when every pulse of her heart was beating more warmly for the child, and every thought of the future was more entirely regulated with reference to her welfare.  It is no sinecure to have the entire devotion of a strong, enterprising, self-willed friend, as Agnes had all her life found.  One cannot gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles, and the affection of thorny and thistly natures has often as sharp an acid and as long prickers as wild gooseberries,—­yet it is their best, and must be so accepted.

Agnes tried several times to offer her help to her grandmother, but was refused so roughly that she dared not offer again, and therefore went to her favorite station by the parapet in the garden, whence she could look up and down the gorge, and through the arches of the old mossy Roman bridge that spanned it far down by the city-wall.  All these things had become dear to her by years of familiar silent converse.  The little garden, with its old sculptured basin, and the ever-lulling dash of falling water,—­the tremulous draperies of maiden’s-hair, always beaded with shining drops,—­the old shrine, with its picture, its lamp, and flower-vase,—­the tall, dusky orange-trees, so full of blossoms and fruit, so smooth and shining in their healthy bark,—­all seemed to her as so many dear old friends whom she was about to leave, perhaps forever.

What this pilgrimage would be like, she scarcely knew:  days and weeks of wandering,—­over mountain-passes,—­in deep, solitary valleys,—­as years ago, when her grandmother brought her, a little child, from Rome.

In the last few weeks, Agnes seemed to herself to have become wholly another being.  Silently, insensibly, her feet had crossed the enchanted river that divides childhood from womanhood, and all the sweet ignorant joys of that first early paradise lay behind her.  Up to this time her life had seemed to her a charming dream, full of blessed visions and images:  legends of saints, and hymns, and prayers had blended with flower-gatherings in the gorge, and light daily toils.

Now, a new, strange life had been born within her,—­a life full of passions, contradictions, and conflicts.  A love had sprung up in her heart, strange and wonderful, for one who till within these few weeks had been entirely unknown to her, who had never toiled for, or housed, or clothed, or cared for her as her grandmother had, and yet whom a few short interviews, a few looks, a few words, had made to seem nearer and dearer than the old, tried friends of her childhood.  In vain she confessed it as a sin,—­in vain she strove against it; it came back to her in every hymn, in every prayer.  Then she would press the sharp cross to her breast, till a thousand stings of pain would send the blood in momentary rushes to her pale cheek, and cause her delicate lips to contract with an expression of stern endurance, and pray that by any penance and anguish she might secure his salvation.