And at the thought she shivered.  Where then was the seclusion, the remoteness, the strange, lonesome Paradise, into which she and her one companion had been transported by their crime?  Was there, indeed, no such refuge, but only a crowded thoroughfare and jostling throng of criminals?  And was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain on it,—­or had poured out poison,—­or strangled a babe at its birth,—­or clutched a grandsire’s throat, he sleeping, and robbed him of his few last breaths,—­had now the right to offer itself in fellowship with their two hands?  Too certainly, that right existed.  It is a terrible thought, that an individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of human crime, and makes us, who dreamed only of our own little separate sin,—­makes us guilty of the whole.  And thus Miriam and her lover were not an insulated pair, but members of an innumerable confraternity of guilty ones, all shuddering at each other.

“But not now; not yet,” she murmured to herself.  “To-night, at least, there shall be no remorse!”

Wandering without a purpose, it so chanced that they turned into a street, at one extremity of which stood Hilda’s tower.  There was a light in her high chamber; a light, too, at the Virgin’s shrine; and the glimmer of these two was the loftiest light beneath the stars.  Miriam drew Donatello’s arm, to make him stop, and while they stood at some distance looking at Hilda’s window, they beheld her approach and throw it open.  She leaned far forth, and extended her clasped hands towards the sky.

“The good, pure child!  She is praying, Donatello,” said Miriam, with a kind of simple joy at witnessing the devoutness of her friend.  Then her own sin rushed upon her, and she shouted, with the rich strength of her voice, “Pray for us, Hilda; we need it!”

Whether Hilda heard and recognized the voice we cannot tell.  The window was immediately closed, and her form disappeared from behind the snowy curtain.  Miriam felt this to be a token that the cry of her condemned spirit was shut out of heaven.

CHAPTER XX

THE BURIAL CHANT

The Church of the Capuchins (where, as the reader may remember, some of our acquaintances had made an engagement to meet) stands a little aside from the Piazza Barberini.  Thither, at the hour agreed upon, on the morning after the scenes last described, Miriam and Donatello directed their steps.  At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.

Yet how tame and wearisome is the impression of all ordinary things in the contrast with such a fact!  How sick and tremulous, the next morning, is the spirit that has dared so much only the night before!  How icy cold is the heart, when the fervor, the wild ecstasy of passion has faded away, and sunk down among the dead ashes of the fire that blazed so fiercely, and was fed by the very substance of its life!  How faintly does the criminal stagger onward, lacking the impulse of that strong madness that hurried him into guilt, and treacherously deserts him in the midst of it!