It would be easy, from conversations which we have held with the sculptor, to suggest a clew to the mystery of Hilda’s disappearance; although, as long as she remained in Italy, there was a remarkable reserve in her communications upon this subject, even to her most intimate friends.  Either a pledge of secrecy had been exacted, or a prudential motive warned her not to reveal the stratagems of a religious body, or the secret acts of a despotic government—­whichever might be responsible in the present instance—­while still within the scope of their jurisdiction.  Possibly, she might not herself be fully aware what power had laid its grasp upon her person.  What has chiefly perplexed us, however, among Hilda’s adventures, is the mode of her release, in which some inscrutable tyranny or other seemed to take part in the frolic of the Carnival.  We can only account for it, by supposing that the fitful and fantastic imagination of a woman—­sportive, because she must otherwise be desperate—­had arranged this incident, and made it the condition of a step which her conscience, or the conscience of another, required her to take.

A few days after Hilda’s reappearance, she and the sculptor were straying together through the streets of Rome.  Being deep in talk, it so happened that they found themselves near the majestic, pillared portico, and huge, black rotundity of the Pantheon.  It stands almost at the central point of the labyrinthine intricacies of the modern city, and often presents itself before the bewildered stranger, when he is in search of other objects.  Hilda, looking up, proposed that they should enter.

“I never pass it without going in,” she said, “to pay my homage at the tomb of Raphael.”

“Nor I,” said Kenyon, “without stopping to admire the noblest edifice which the barbarism of the early ages, and the more barbarous pontiffs and princes of later ones, have spared to us.”

They went in accordingly, and stood in the free space of that great circle, around which are ranged the arched recesses and stately altars, formerly dedicated to heathen gods, but Christianized through twelve centuries gone by.  The world has nothing else like the Pantheon.  So grand it is, that the pasteboard statues over the lofty cornice do not disturb the effect, any more than the tin crowns and hearts, the dusty artificial flowers, and all manner of trumpery gew-gaws, hanging at the saintly shrines.  The rust and dinginess that have dimmed the precious marble on the walls; the pavement, with its great squares and rounds of porphyry and granite, cracked crosswise and in a hundred directions, showing how roughly the troublesome ages have trampled here; the gray dome above, with its opening to the sky, as if heaven were looking down into the interior of this place of worship, left unimpeded for prayers to ascend the more freely; all these things make an impression of solemnity, which St. Peter’s itself fails to produce.