And now, for the first time in her lengthened absence, comprising so many years of her young life, she began to be acquainted with the exile’s pain.  Her pictorial imagination brought up vivid scenes of her native village, with its great old elm-trees; and the neat, comfortable houses, scattered along the wide, grassy margin of its street, and the white meeting-house, and her mother’s very door, and the stream of gold brown water, which her taste for color had kept flowing, all this while, through her remembrance.  O dreary streets, palaces, churches, and imperial sepulchres of hot and dusty Rome, with the muddy Tiber eddying through the midst, instead of the gold-brown rivulet!  How she pined under this crumbly magnificence, as if it were piled all upon her human heart!  How she yearned for that native homeliness, those familiar sights, those faces which she had known always, those days that never brought any strange event; that life of sober week-days, and a solemn sabbath at the close!  The peculiar fragrance of a flower-bed, which Hilda used to cultivate, came freshly to her memory, across the windy sea, and through the long years since the flowers had withered.  Her heart grew faint at the hundred reminiscences that were awakened by that remembered smell of dead blossoms; it was like opening a drawer, where many things were laid away, and every one of them scented with lavender and dried rose-leaves.

We ought not to betray Hilda’s secret; but it is the truth, that being so sad, and so utterly alone, and in such great need of sympathy, her thoughts sometimes recurred to the sculptor.  Had she met him now, her heart, indeed, might not have been won, but her confidence would have flown to him like a bird to its nest.  One summer afternoon, especially, Hilda leaned upon the battlements of her tower, and looked over Rome towards the distant mountains, whither Kenyon had told her that he was going.

“O that he were here!” she sighed; “I perish under this terrible secret; and he might help me to endure it.  O that he were here!”

That very afternoon, as the reader may remember, Kenyon felt Hilda’s hand pulling at the silken cord that was connected with his heart-strings, as he stood looking towards Rome from the battlements of Monte Beni.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

ALTARS AND INCENSE

Rome has a certain species of consolation readier at hand, for all the necessitous, than any other spot under the sun; and Hilda’s despondent state made her peculiarly liable to the peril, if peril it can justly be termed, of seeking, or consenting, to be thus consoled.