“You shudder at me, I perceive,” said Miriam, suddenly interrupting her narrative.

“No; you were innocent,” replied the sculptor.  “I shudder at the fatality that seems to haunt your footsteps, and throws a shadow of crime about your path, you being guiltless.”

“There was such a fatality,” said Miriam; “yes; the shadow fell upon me, innocent, but I went astray in it, and wandered—­as Hilda could tell you—­into crime.”

She went on to say that, while yet a child, she had lost her English mother.  From a very early period of her life, there had been a contract of betrothal between herself and a certain marchese, the representative of another branch of her paternal house,—­a family arrangement between two persons of disproportioned ages, and in which feeling went for nothing.  Most Italian girls of noble rank would have yielded themselves to such a marriage as an affair of course.  But there was something in Miriam’s blood, in her mixed race, in her recollections of her mother,—­some characteristic, finally, in her own nature,—­which had given her freedom of thought, and force of will, and made this prearranged connection odious to her.  Moreover, the character of her destined husband would have been a sufficient and insuperable objection; for it betrayed traits so evil, so treacherous, so vile, and yet so strangely subtle, as could only be accounted for by the insanity which often develops itself in old, close-kept races of men, when long unmixed with newer blood.  Reaching the age when the marriage contract should have been fulfilled, Miriam had utterly repudiated it.

Some time afterwards had occurred that terrible event to which Miriam had alluded when she revealed her name; an event, the frightful and mysterious circumstances of which will recur to many minds, but of which few or none can have found for themselves a satisfactory explanation.  It only concerns the present narrative, inasmuch as the suspicion of being at least an accomplice in the crime fell darkly and directly upon Miriam herself.

“But you know that I am innocent!” she cried, interrupting herself again, and looking Kenyon in the face.

“I know it by my deepest consciousness,” he answered; “and I know it by Hilda’s trust and entire affection, which you never could have won had you been capable of guilt.”

“That is sure ground, indeed, for pronouncing me innocent,” said Miriam, with the tears gushing into her eyes.  “Yet I have since become a horror to your saint-like Hilda, by a crime which she herself saw me help to perpetrate!”