s
excited nerves had played a trick upon his senses, as they are apt to do
when we most wish for the clear evidence of the latter.

There was nothing to be done, save to go heavily away, and await
whatever good or ill to-morrow's daylight might disclose.

Betimes in the morning, therefore, Kenyon went back to the Via
Portoghese, before the slant rays of the sun had descended halfway down
the gray front of Hilda's tower. As he drew near its base, he saw the
doves perched in full session, on the sunny height of the battlements,
and a pair of them--who were probably their mistress's especial pets,
and the confidants of her bosom secrets, if Hilda had any--came shooting
down, and made a feint of alighting on his shoulder. But, though they
evidently recognized him, their shyness would not yet allow so decided
a demonstration. Kenyon's eyes followed them as they flew upward, hoping
that they might have come as joyful messengers of the girl's safety,
and that he should discern her slender form, half hidden by the parapet,
trimming the extinguished lamp at the Virgin's shrine, just as other
maidens set about the little duties of a household. Or, perhaps, he
might see her gentle and sweet face smiling down upon him, midway
towards heaven, as if she had flown thither for a day or two, just to
visit her kindred, but had been drawn earthward again by the spell of
unacknowledged love.

But his eyes were blessed by no such fair vision or reality; nor, in
truth, were the eager, unquiet flutterings of the doves indicative of
any joyful intelligence, which they longed to share with Hilda's friend,
but of anxious inquiries that they knew not how to utter. They could
not tell, any more than he, whither their lost companion had withdrawn
herself, but were in the same void despondency with him, feeling their
sunny and airy lives darkened and grown imperfect, now that her sweet
society was taken out of it.

In the brisk morning air, Kenyon found it much easier to pursue his
researches than at the preceding midnight, when, if any slumberers heard
the clamor that he made, they had responded only with sullen and drowsy
maledictions, and turned to sleep again. It must be a very dear and
intimate reality for which people will be content to give up a dream.
When the sun was fairly up, however, it was quite another thing. The
heterogeneous population, inhabiting the lower floor of the old tower,
and the other extensive regions of the palace, we