Donatello paused two or three times, and seemed to listen,—­then, recommencing, he poured his spirit and life more earnestly into the strain.  And finally,—­or else the sculptor’s hope and imagination deceived him,—­soft treads were audible upon the fallen leaves.  There was a rustling among the shrubbery; a whir of wings, moreover, that hovered in the air.  It may have been all an illusion; but Kenyon fancied that he could distinguish the stealthy, cat-like movement of some small forest citizen, and that he could even see its doubtful shadow, if not really its substance.  But, all at once, whatever might be the reason, there ensued a hurried rush and scamper of little feet; and then the sculptor heard a wild, sorrowful cry, and through the crevices of the thicket beheld Donatello fling himself on the ground.

Emerging from his hiding-place, he saw no living thing, save a brown lizard (it was of the tarantula species) rustling away through the sunshine.  To all present appearance, this venomous reptile was the only creature that had responded to the young Count’s efforts to renew his intercourse with the lower orders of nature.

“What has happened to you?” exclaimed Kenyon, stooping down over his friend, and wondering at the anguish which he betrayed.

“Death, death!” sobbed Donatello.  “They know it!”

He grovelled beside the fountain, in a fit of such passionate sobbing and weeping, that it seemed as if his heart had broken, and spilt its wild sorrows upon the ground.  His unrestrained grief and childish tears made Kenyon sensible in how small a degree the customs and restraints of society had really acted upon this young man, in spite of the quietude of his ordinary deportment.  In response to his friend’s efforts to console him, he murmured words hardly more articulate than the strange chant which he had so recently been breathing into the air.

“They know it!” was all that Kenyon could yet distinguish,—­“they know it!”

“Who know it?” asked the sculptor.  “And what is it their know?” “They know it!” repeated Donatello, trembling.  “They shun me!  All nature shrinks from me, and shudders at me!  I live in the midst of a curse, that hems me round with a circle of fire!  No innocent thing can come near me.”

“Be comforted, my dear friend,” said Kenyon, kneeling beside him.  “You labor under some illusion, but no curse.  As for this strange, natural spell, which you have been exercising, and of which I have heard before, though I never believed in, nor expected to witness it, I am satisfied that you still possess it.  It was my own half-concealed presence, no doubt, and some involuntary little movement of mine, that scared away your forest friends.”

“They are friends of mine no longer,” answered Donatello.

“We all of us, as we grow older,” rejoined Kenyon, “lose somewhat of our proximity to nature.  It is the price we pay for experience.”