“O, yes,” answered the young man; and, though not of a retrospective turn, he made the best effort he could to send his mind back into the past.  “I remember thinking it happiness to dance with the contadinas at a village feast; to taste the new, sweet wine at vintage-time, and the old, ripened wine, which our podere is famous for, in the cold winter evenings; and to devour great, luscious figs, and apricots, peaches, cherries, and melons.  I was often happy in the woods, too, with hounds and horses, and very happy in watching all sorts, of creatures and birds that haunt the leafy solitudes.  But never half so happy as now!”

“In these delightful groves?” she asked.

“Here, and with you,” answered Donatello.  “Just as we are now.”

“What a fulness of content in him!  How silly, and how delightful!” said Miriam to herself.  Then addressing him again:  “But, Donatello, how long will this happiness last?”

“How long!” he exclaimed; for it perplexed him even more to think of the future than to remember the past.  “Why should it have any end?  How long!  Forever! forever! forever!”

“The child! the simpleton!” said Miriam, with sudden laughter, and checking it as suddenly.  “But is he a simpleton indeed?  Here, in those few natural words, he has expressed that deep sense, that profound conviction of its own immortality, which genuine love never fails to bring.  He perplexes me,—­yes, and bewitches me,—­wild, gentle, beautiful creature that he is!  It is like playing with a young greyhound!”

Her eyes filled with tears, at the same time that a smile shone out of them.  Then first she became sensible of a delight and grief at once, in feeling this zephyr of a new affection, with its untainted freshness, blow over her weary, stifled heart, which had no right to be revived by it.  The very exquisiteness of the enjoyment made her know that it ought to be a forbidden one.

“Donatello,” she hastily exclaimed, “for your own sake, leave me!  It is not such a happy thing as you imagine it, to wander in these woods with me, a girl from another land, burdened with a doom that she tells to none.  I might make you dread me,—­perhaps hate me,—­if I chose; and I must choose, if I find you loving me too well!”

“I fear nothing!” said Donatello, looking into her unfathomable eyes with perfect trust.  “I love always!”

“I speak in vain,” thought Miriam within herself.

“Well, then, for this one hour, let me be such as he imagines me.  To-morrow will be time enough to come back to my reality.  My reality! what is it?  Is the past so indestructible? the future so immitigable?  Is the dark dream, in which I walk, of such solid, stony substance, that there can be no escape out of its dungeon?  Be it so!  There is, at least, that ethereal quality in my spirit, that it can make me as gay as Donatello himself,—­for this one hour!”

And immediately she brightened up, as if an inward flame, heretofore stifled, were now permitted to fill her with its happy lustre, glowing through her cheeks and dancing in her eye-beams.