peaceful, happy, innocent life, then flee from me.  Look not behind you!  Get you gone without another word.”  He gazed sadly at her, but did not stir.  “I tell you,” Miriam went on, “there is a great evil hanging over me!  I know it; I see it in the sky; I feel it in the air!  It will overwhelm me as utterly as if this arch should crumble down upon our heads!  It will crush you, too, if you stand at my side!  Depart, then; and make the sign of the cross, as your faith bids you, when an evil spirit is nigh.  Cast me off, or you are lost forever.”

A higher sentiment brightened upon Donatello’s face than had hitherto seemed to belong to its simple expression and sensuous beauty.

“I will never quit you,” he said; “you cannot drive me from you.”

“Poor Donatello!” said Miriam in a changed tone, and rather to herself than him.  “Is there no other that seeks me out, follows me,—­is obstinate to share my affliction and my doom,—­but only you!  They call me beautiful; and I used to fancy that, at my need, I could bring the whole world to my feet.  And lo! here is my utmost need; and my beauty and my gifts have brought me only this poor, simple boy.  Half-witted, they call him; and surely fit for nothing but to be happy.  And I accept his aid!  To-morrow, to-morrow, I will tell him all!  Ah! what a sin to stain his joyous nature with the blackness of a woe like mine!”

She held out her hand to him, and smiled sadly as Donatello pressed it to his lips.  They were now about to emerge from the depth of the arch; but just then the kneeling pilgrim, in his revolution round the orbit of the shrines, had reached the one on the steps of which Miriam had been sitting.  There, as at the other shrines, he prayed, or seemed to pray.  It struck Kenyon, however,—­who sat close by, and saw his face distinctly, that the suppliant was merely performing an enjoined penance, and without the penitence that ought to have given it effectual life.  Even as he knelt, his eyes wandered, and Miriam soon felt that he had detected her, half hidden as she was within the obscurity of the arch.

“He is evidently a good Catholic, however,” whispered one of the party.  “After all, I fear we cannot identify him with the ancient pagan who haunts the catacombs.”

“The doctors of the Propaganda may have converted him,” said another; “they have had fifteen hundred years to perform the task.”

The company now deemed it time to continue their ramble.  Emerging from a side entrance of the Coliseum, they had on their left the Arch of Constantine, and above it the shapeless ruins of the Palace of the Caesars; portions of which have taken shape anew, in mediaeval convents and modern villas.  They turned their faces cityward, and, treading over the broad flagstones of the old Roman pavement, passed through the Arch of Titus.  The moon shone brightly enough within it to show the seven-branched Jewish candlestick, cut in the marble of the interior.  The original of that awful trophy lies buried, at this moment, in the yellow mud of the Tiber; and, could its gold of Ophir again be brought to light, it would be the most precious relic of past ages, in the estimation of both Jew and Gentile.