“I feel it, Miriam,” said Donatello.  “We draw one breath; we live one life!”

“Only yesterday,” continued Miriam; “nay, only a short half-hour ago, I shivered in an icy solitude.  No friendship, no sisterhood, could come near enough to keep the warmth within my heart.  In an instant all is changed!  There can be no more loneliness!”

“None, Miriam!” said Donatello.

“None, my beautiful one!” responded Miriam, gazing in his face, which had taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect, from the strength of passion.  “None, my innocent one!  Surely, it is no crime that we have committed.  One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cement two other lives for evermore.”

“For evermore, Miriam!” said Donatello; “cemented with his blood!”

The young man started at the word which he had himself spoken; it may be that it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, what he had not before dreamed of,—­the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a union that consists in guilt.  Cemented with blood, which would corrupt and grow more noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the less strictly for that.

“Forget it!  Cast it all behind you!” said Miriam, detecting, by her sympathy, the pang that was in his heart.  “The deed has done its office, and has no existence any more.”

They flung the past behind them, as she counselled, or else distilled from it a fiery, intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly through those first moments of their doom.  For guilt has its moment of rapture too.  The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic sense of freedom.  And thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an insanity, which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy innocence that was forever lost to them.

As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they went onward, not stealthily, not fearfully, but with a stately gait and aspect.  Passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief nobility of carriage.  They trod through the streets of Rome, as if they, too, were among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ages long gone by, have haunted the blood-stained city.  And, at Miriam’s suggestion, they turned aside, for the sake of treading loftily past the old site of Pompey’s Forum.

“For there was a great deed done here!” she said,—­“a deed of blood like ours!  Who knows but we may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity of Caesar’s murderers, and exchange a salutation?”

“Are they our brethren, now?” asked Donatello.

“Yes; all of them,” said Miriam,—­“and many another, whom the world little dreams of, has been made our brother or our sister, by what we have done within this hour!”