They were singing the second verse, as, emerging from the dark old gate-way of the town, all the distant landscape of silvery olive-orchards, crimson clover-fields, blossoming almond-trees, fig-trees, and grape-vines, just in the tender green of spring, burst upon their view.  Agnes felt a kind of inspiration.  From the high mountain elevation she could discern the far-off brightness of the sea—­ all between one vision of beauty,—­and the religious enthusiasm which possessed all around her had in her eye all the value of the most solid and reasonable faith.  With us, who may look on it from a colder and more distant point of view, doubts may be suggested whether this naive impressibility to religious influences, this simple, whole-hearted abandonment to their expression, had any real practical value.  The fact that any or all of the actors might before night rob or stab or lie quite as freely as if it has not occurred may well give reason for such a question.  Be this as it may, the phenomenon is not confined to Italy or the religion of the Middle Ages, but exhibits itself in many a prayer-meeting and camp-meeting of modern days.  For our own part, we hold it better to have even transient upliftings of the nobler and more devout element of man’s nature than never to have any at all, and that he who goes on in worldly and sordid courses, without ever a spark of religious enthusiasm or a throb of aspiration, is less of a man than he who sometimes soars heavenward, though his wings be weak and he fall again.

In all this scene Agostino Sarelli took no part.  He had simply given orders for the safe-conduct of Agnes, and then retired to his own room.  From a window, however, he watched the procession as it passed through the gates of the city, and his resolution was immediately taken to proceed at once by a secret path to the place where the pilgrims should emerge upon the high-road.

He had been induced to allow the departure of Agnes, from seeing the utter hopelessness by any argument or persuasion of removing a barrier that was so vitally interwoven with the most sensitive religious nerves of her being.  He saw in her terrified looks, in the deadly paleness of her face, how real and unaffected was the anguish which his words gave her; he saw that the very consciousness of her own love to him produced a sense of weakness which made her shrink in utter terror from his arguments.

“There is no remedy,” he said, “but to let her go to Rome and see with her own eyes how utterly false and vain is the vision which she draws from the purity of her own believing soul.  What Christian would not wish that these fair dreams had any earthly reality?  But this gentle dove must not be left unprotected to fly into that foul, unclean cage of vultures and harpies.  Deadly as the peril may be to me to breathe the air of Rome, I will be around her invisibly to watch over her.”

CHAPTER XXVI.