“A heavy price, then!” said Donatello, rising from the ground.  “But we will speak no more of it.  Forget this scene, my dear friend.  In your eyes, it must look very absurd.  It is a grief, I presume, to all men, to find the pleasant privileges and properties of early life departing from them.  That grief has now befallen me.  Well; I shall waste no more tears for such a cause!”

Nothing else made Kenyon so sensible of a change in Donatello, as his newly acquired power of dealing with his own emotions, and, after a struggle more or less fierce, thrusting them down into the prison cells where he usually kept them confined.  The restraint, which he now put upon himself, and the mask of dull composure which he succeeded in clasping over his still beautiful, and once faun-like face, affected the sensitive sculptor more sadly than even the unrestrained passion of the preceding scene.  It is a very miserable epoch, when the evil necessities of life, in our tortuous world, first get the better of us so far as to compel us to attempt throwing a cloud over our transparency.  Simplicity increases in value the longer we can keep it, and the further we carry it onward into life; the loss of a child’s simplicity, in the inevitable lapse of years, causes but a natural sigh or two, because even his mother feared that he could not keep it always.  But after a young man has brought it through his childhood, and has still worn it in his bosom, not as an early dewdrop, but as a diamond of pure white lustre,—­it is a pity to lose it, then.  And thus, when Kenyon saw how much his friend had now to hide, and how well he hid it, he would have wept, although his tears would have been even idler than those which Donatello had just shed.

They parted on the lawn before the house, the Count to climb his tower, and the sculptor to read an antique edition of Dante, which he had found among some old volumes of Catholic devotion, in a seldom-visited room, Tomaso met him in the entrance hall, and showed a desire to speak.

“Our poor signorino looks very sad to-day!” he said.

“Even so, good Tomaso,” replied the sculptor.  “Would that we could raise his spirits a little!”

“There might be means, Signore,” answered the old butler, “if one might but be sure that they were the right ones.  We men are but rough nurses for a sick body or a sick spirit.”

“Women, you would say, my good friend, are better,” said the sculptor, struck by an intelligence in the butler’s face.  “That is possible!  But it depends.”

“Ah; we will wait a little longer,” said Tomaso, with the customary shake of his head.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE OWL TOWER

“Will you not show me your tower?” said the sculptor one day to his friend.

“It is plainly enough to be seen, methinks,” answered the Count, with a kind of sulkiness that often appeared in him, as one of the little symptoms of inward trouble.