hich Hilda's gentle purity,
the sculptor's sensibility, clear thought, and genius, and Donatello's
genial simplicity had given her almost her first experience of
happiness. Then came that ill-omened adventure of the catacomb, The
spectral figure which she encountered there was the evil fate that had
haunted her through life.

Looking back upon what had happened, Miriam observed, she now considered
him a madman. Insanity must have been mixed up with his original
composition, and developed by those very acts of depravity which it
suggested, and still more intensified, by the remorse that ultimately
followed them. Nothing was stranger in his dark career than the
penitence which often seemed to go hand in hand with crime. Since his
death she had ascertained that it finally led him to a convent,
where his severe and self-inflicted penance had even acquired him the
reputation of unusual sanctity, and had been the cause of his enjoying
greater freedom than is commonly allowed to monks.

"Need I tell you more?" asked Miriam, after proceeding thus far. "It
is still a dim and dreary mystery, a gloomy twilight into which I guide
you; but possibly you may catch a glimpse of much that I myself can
explain only by conjecture. At all events, you can comprehend what my
situation must have been, after that fatal interview in the catacomb.
My persecutor had gone thither for penance, but followed me forth with
fresh impulses to crime. He had me in his power. Mad as he was, and
wicked as he was, with one word he could have blasted me in the belief
of all the world. In your belief too, and Hilda's! Even Donatello would
have shrunk from me with horror!"

"Never," said Donatello, "my instinct would have known you innocent."

"Hilda and Donatello and myself,--we three would have acquitted you,"
said Kenyon, "let the world say what it might. Ah, Miriam, you should
have told us this sad story sooner!"

"I thought often of revealing it to you," answered Miriam; "on one
occasion, especially,--it was after you had shown me your Cleopatra;
it seemed to leap out of my heart, and got as far as my very lips. But
finding you cold to accept my confidence, I thrust it back again. Had I
obeyed my first impulse, all would have turned out differently."

"And Hilda!" resumed the sculptor. "What can have been her connection
with these dark incidents?"

"She will, doubtless, tell you with her own lips," replied Miriam.
"Through sources of information wh