“I cannot jest about it,” said Kenyon.  “It is an ugly sight!”

“True, true; horrible to see, or dream of!” she replied, with one of those long, tremulous sighs, which so often betray a sick heart by escaping unexpectedly.  “We will not look at it any more.  Come away, Donatello.  Let us escape from this dismal church.  The sunshine will do you good.”

When had ever a woman such a trial to sustain as this!  By no possible supposition could Miriam explain the identity of the dead Capuchin, quietly and decorously laid out in the nave of his convent church, with that of her murdered persecutor, flung heedlessly at the foot of the precipice.  The effect upon her imagination was as if a strange and unknown corpse had miraculously, while she was gazing at it, assumed the likeness of that face, so terrible henceforth in her remembrance.  It was a symbol, perhaps, of the deadly iteration with which she was doomed to behold the image of her crime reflected back upon her in a thousand ways, and converting the great, calm face of Nature, in the whole, and in its innumerable details, into a manifold reminiscence of that one dead visage.

No sooner had Miriam turned away from the bier, and gone a few steps, than she fancied the likeness altogether an illusion, which would vanish at a closer and colder view.  She must look at it again, therefore, and at once; or else the grave would close over the face, and leave the awful fantasy that had connected itself therewith fixed ineffaceably in her brain.

“Wait for me, one moment!” she said to her companions.  “Only a moment!”

So she went back, and gazed once more at the corpse.  Yes; these were the features that Miriam had known so well; this was the visage that she remembered from a far longer date than the most intimate of her friends suspected; this form of clay had held the evil spirit which blasted her sweet youth, and compelled her, as it were, to stain her womanhood with crime.  But, whether it were the majesty of death, or something originally noble and lofty in the character of the dead, which the soul had stamped upon the features, as it left them; so it was that Miriam now quailed and shook, not for the vulgar horror of the spectacle, but for the severe, reproachful glance that seemed to come from between those half-closed lids.  True, there had been nothing, in his lifetime, viler than this man.  She knew it; there was no other fact within her consciousness that she felt to be so certain; and yet, because her persecutor found himself safe and irrefutable in death, he frowned upon his victim, and threw back the blame on her!

“Is it thou, indeed?” she murmured, under her breath.  “Then thou hast no right to scowl upon me so!  But art thou real, or a vision?” She bent down over the dead monk, till one of her rich curls brushed against his forehead.  She touched one of his folded hands with her finger.

“It is he,” said Miriam.  “There is the scar, that I know so well, on his brow.  And it is no vision; he is palpable to my touch!  I will question the fact no longer, but deal with it as I best can.”