“Did you not mean that he should die?” sternly asked Donatello, still in the glow of that intelligence which passion had developed in him.  “There was short time to weigh the matter; but he had his trial in that breath or two while I held him over the cliff, and his sentence in that one glance, when your eyes responded to mine!  Say that I have slain him against your will,—­say that he died without your whole consent,—­and, in another breath, you shall see me lying beside him.”

“O, never!” cried Miriam.  “My one, own friend!  Never, never, never!”

She turned to him,—­the guilty, bloodstained, lonely woman,—­she turned to her fellow criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had drawn into her doom.  She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with a clinging embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horror and agony of each was combined into one emotion, and that a kind of rapture.

“Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!” said she; “my heart consented to what you did.  We two slew yonder wretch.  The deed knots us together, for time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!”

They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to assure themselves that it was there; so like a dream was the whole thing.  Then they turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the courtyard, arm in arm, heart in heart.  Instinctively, they were heedful not to sever themselves so much as a pace or two from one another, for fear of the terror and deadly chill that would thenceforth wait for them in solitude.  Their deed—­the crime which Donatello wrought, and Miriam accepted on the instant—­had wreathed itself, as she said, like a serpent, in inextricable links about both their souls, and drew them into one, by its terrible contractile power.  It was closer than a marriage bond.  So intimate, in those first moments, was the union, that it seemed as if their new sympathy annihilated all other ties, and that they were released from the chain of humanity; a new sphere, a special law, had been created for them alone.  The world could not come near them; they were safe!

When they reached the flight of steps leading downward from the Capitol, there was a faroff noise of singing and laughter.  Swift, indeed, had been the rush of the crisis that was come and gone!  This was still the merriment of the party that had so recently been their companions.  They recognized the voices which, a little while ago, had accorded and sung in cadence with their own.  But they were familiar voices no more; they sounded strangely, and, as it were, out of the depths of space; so remote was all that pertained to the past life of these guilty ones, in the moral seclusion that had suddenly extended itself around them.  But how close, and ever closer, did the breath of the immeasurable waste, that lay between them and all brotherhood or sisterhood, now press them one within the other!

“O friend!” cried Miriam, so putting her soul into the word that it took a heavy richness of meaning, and seemed never to have been spoken before, “O friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this companionship that knits our heart-strings together?”