moreover, the imagination is not debarred from lending its assistance, even while we have the reality before our eyes, and helping the weakness of human sense to do justice to so grand an object.  It requires both faith and fancy to enable us to feel, what is nevertheless so true, that yonder, in front of the purple outline of hills, is the grandest edifice ever built by man, painted against God’s loveliest sky.

After contemplating a little while a scene which their long residence in Rome had made familiar to them, Kenyon and Hilda again let their glances fall into the piazza at their feet.  They there beheld Miriam, who had just entered the Porta del Popolo, and was standing by the obelisk and fountain.  With a gesture that impressed Kenyon as at once suppliant and imperious, she seemed to intimate to a figure which had attended her thus far, that it was now her desire to be left alone.  The pertinacious model, however, remained immovable.

And the sculptor here noted a circumstance, which, according to the interpretation he might put upon it, was either too trivial to be mentioned, or else so mysteriously significant that he found it difficult to believe his eyes.  Miriam knelt down on the steps of the fountain; so far there could be no question of the fact.  To other observers, if any there were, she probably appeared to take this attitude merely for the convenience of dipping her fingers into the gush of water from the mouth of one of the stone lions.  But as she clasped her hands together after thus bathing them, and glanced upward at the model, an idea took strong possession of Kenyon’s mind that Miriam was kneeling to this dark follower there in the world’s face!

“Do you see it?” he said to Hilda.

“See what?” asked she, surprised at the emotion of his tone.  “I see Miriam, who has just bathed her hands in that delightfully cool water.  I often dip my fingers into a Roman fountain, and think of the brook that used to be one of my playmates in my New England village.”

“I fancied I saw something else,” said Kenyon; “but it was doubtless a mistake.”

But, allowing that he had caught a true glimpse into the hidden significance of Miriam’s gesture, what a terrible thraldom did it suggest!  Free as she seemed to be,—­beggar as he looked,—­the nameless vagrant must then be dragging the beautiful Miriam through the streets of Rome, fettered and shackled more cruelly than any captive queen of yore following in an emperor’s triumph.  And was it conceivable that she would have been thus enthralled unless some great error—­how great Kenyon dared not think—­or some fatal weakness had given this dark adversary a vantage ground?

“Hilda,” said he abruptly, “who and what is Miriam?  Pardon me; but are you sure of her?”

“Sure of her!” repeated Hilda, with an angry blush, for her friend’s sake.  “I am sure that she is kind, good, and generous; a true and faithful friend, whom I love dearly, and who loves me as well!  What more than this need I be sure of?”