“I did,” replied Donatello gloomily and absently.

Miriam released the young man’s hand, but suffered one of her own to lie close to his, and waited a moment to see whether he would make any effort to retain it.  There was much depending upon that simple experiment.

With a deep sigh—­as when, sometimes, a slumberer turns over in a troubled dream Donatello changed his position, and clasped both his hands over his forehead.  The genial warmth of a Roman April kindling into May was in the atmosphere around them; but when Miriam saw that involuntary movement and heard that sigh of relief (for so she interpreted it), a shiver ran through her frame, as if the iciest wind of the Apennines were blowing over her.

“He has done himself a greater wrong than I dreamed of,” thought she, with unutterable compassion.  “Alas! it was a sad mistake!  He might have had a kind of bliss in the consequences of this deed, had he been impelled to it by a love vital enough to survive the frenzy of that terrible moment, mighty enough to make its own law, and justify itself against the natural remorse.  But to have perpetrated a dreadful murder (and such was his crime, unless love, annihilating moral distinctions, made it otherwise) on no better warrant than a boy’s idle fantasy!  I pity him from the very depths of my soul!  As for myself, I am past my own or other’s pity.”

She arose from the young man’s side, and stood before him with a sad, commiserating aspect; it was the look of a ruined soul, bewailing, in him, a grief less than what her profounder sympathies imposed upon herself.

“Donatello, we must part,” she said, with melancholy firmness.  “Yes; leave me!  Go back to your old tower, which overlooks the green valley you have told me of among the Apennines.  Then, all that has passed will be recognized as but an ugly dream.  For in dreams the conscience sleeps, and we often stain ourselves with guilt of which we should be incapable in our waking moments.  The deed you seemed to do, last night, was no more than such a dream; there was as little substance in what you fancied yourself doing.  Go; and forget it all!”

“Ah, that terrible face!” said Donatello, pressing his hands over his eyes.  “Do you call that unreal?”

“Yes; for you beheld it with dreaming eyes,” replied Miriam.  “It was unreal; and, that you may feel it so, it is requisite that you see this face of mine no more.  Once, you may have thought it beautiful; now, it has lost its charm.  Yet it would still retain a miserable potency’ to bring back the past illusion, and, in its train, the remorse and anguish that would darken all your life.  Leave me, therefore, and forget me.”

“Forget you, Miriam!” said Donatello, roused somewhat from his apathy of despair.

“If I could remember you, and behold you, apart from that frightful visage which stares at me over your shoulder, that were a consolation, at least, if not a joy.”