Kenyon now looked at Donatello.

“You seem out of spirits, my dear friend,” he observed.  “This languid Roman atmosphere is not the airy wine that you were accustomed to breathe at home.  I have not forgotten your hospitable invitation to meet you this summer at your castle among the Apennines.  It is my fixed purpose to come, I assure you.  We shall both be the better for some deep draughts of the mountain breezes.”

“It may he,” said Donatello, with unwonted sombreness; “the old house seemed joyous when I was a child.  But as I remember it now it was a grim place, too.”

The sculptor looked more attentively at the young man, and was surprised and alarmed to observe how entirely the fine, fresh glow of animal spirits had departed out of his face.  Hitherto, moreover, even while he was standing perfectly still, there had been a kind of possible gambol indicated in his aspect.  It was quite gone now.  All his youthful gayety, and with it his simplicity of manner, was eclipsed, if not utterly extinct.

“You are surely ill, my dear fellow,” exclaimed Kenyon.

“Am I?  Perhaps so,” said Donatello indifferently; “I never have been ill, and know not what it may be.”

“Do not make the poor lad fancy-sink,” whispered Miriam, pulling the sculptor’s sleeve.  “He is of a nature to lie down and die at once, if he finds himself drawing such melancholy breaths as we ordinary people are enforced to burden our lungs withal.  But we must get him away from this old, dreamy and dreary Rome, where nobody but himself ever thought of being gay.  Its influences are too heavy to sustain the life of such a creature.”

The above conversation had passed chiefly on the steps of the Cappuccini; and, having said so much, Miriam lifted the leathern curtain that hangs before all church-doors in italy.  “Hilda has forgotten her appointment,” she observed, “or else her maiden slumbers are very sound this morning.  We will wait for her no longer.”

They entered the nave.  The interior of the church was of moderate compass, but of good architecture, with a vaulted roof over the nave, and a row of dusky chapels on either side of it instead of the customary side-aisles.  Each chapel had its saintly shrine, hung round with offerings; its picture above the altar, although closely veiled, if by any painter of renown; and its hallowed tapers, burning continually, to set alight the devotion of the worshippers.  The pavement of the nave was chiefly of marble, and looked old and broken, and was shabbily patched here and there with tiles of brick; it was inlaid, moreover, with tombstones of the mediaeval taste, on which were quaintly sculptured borders, figures, and portraits in bas-relief, and Latin epitaphs, now grown illegible by the tread of footsteps over them.  The church appertains to a convent of Capuchin monks; and, as usually happens when a reverend brotherhood have such an edifice in charge, the floor seemed never to have been scrubbed or swept, and had as little the aspect of sanctity as a kennel; whereas, in all churches of nunneries, the maiden sisterhood invariably show the purity of their own hearts by the virgin cleanliness and visible consecration of the walls and pavement.