It was wonderful to see how the crisis developed in Miriam its own proper strength, and the faculty of sustaining the demands which it made upon her fortitude.  She ceased to tremble; the beautiful woman gazed sternly at her dead enemy, endeavoring to meet and quell the look of accusation that he threw from between his half-closed eyelids.

“No; thou shalt not scowl me down!” said she.  “Neither now, nor when we stand together at the judgment-seat.  I fear not to meet thee there.  Farewell, till that next encounter!”

Haughtily waving her hand, Miriam rejoined her friends, who were awaiting her at the door of the church.  As they went out, the sacristan stopped them, and proposed to show the cemetery of the convent, where the deceased members of the fraternity are laid to rest in sacred earth, brought long ago from Jerusalem.

“And will yonder monk be buried there?” she asked.

“Brother Antonio?” exclaimed the sacristan.

“Surely, our good brother will be put to bed there!  His grave is already dug, and the last occupant has made room for him.  Will you look at it, signorina?”

“I will!” said Miriam.

“Then excuse me,” observed Kenyon; “for I shall leave you.  One dead monk has more than sufficed me; and I am not bold enough to face the whole mortality of the convent.”

It was easy to see, by Donatello’s looks, that he, as well as the sculptor, would gladly have escaped a visit to the famous cemetery of the Cappuccini.  But Miriam’s nerves were strained to such a pitch, that she anticipated a certain solace and absolute relief in passing from one ghastly spectacle to another of long-accumulated ugliness; and there was, besides, a singular sense of duty which impelled her to look at the final resting-place of the being whose fate had been so disastrously involved with her own.  She therefore followed the sacristan’s guidance, and drew her companion along with her, whispering encouragement as they went.

The cemetery is beneath the church, but entirely above ground, and lighted by a row of iron-grated windows without glass.  A corridor runs along beside these windows, and gives access to three or four vaulted recesses, or chapels, of considerable breadth and height, the floor of which consists of the consecrated earth of Jerusalem.  It is smoothed decorously over the deceased brethren of the convent, and is kept quite free from grass or weeds, such as would grow even in these gloomy recesses, if pains were not bestowed to root them up.  But, as the cemetery is small, and it is a precious privilege to sleep in holy ground, the brotherhood are immemorially accustomed, when one of their number dies, to take the longest buried skeleton out of the oldest grave, and lay the new slumberer there instead.  Thus, each of the good friars, in his turn, enjoys the luxury of a consecrated bed, attended with the slight drawback of being forced to get up long before daybreak, as it were, and make room for another lodger.