e was a remarkable
reserve in her communications upon this subject, even to her most
intimate friends. Either a pledge of secrecy had been exacted, or a
prudential motive warned her not to reveal the stratagems of a religious
body, or the secret acts of a despotic government--whichever might be
responsible in the present instance--while still within the scope of
their jurisdiction. Possibly, she might not herself be fully aware what
power had laid its grasp upon her person. What has chiefly perplexed us,
however, among Hilda's adventures, is the mode of her release, in which
some inscrutable tyranny or other seemed to take part in the frolic of
the Carnival. We can only account for it, by supposing that the fitful
and fantastic imagination of a woman--sportive, because she must
otherwise be desperate--had arranged this incident, and made it the
condition of a step which her conscience, or the conscience of another,
required her to take.

A few days after Hilda's reappearance, she and the sculptor were
straying together through the streets of Rome. Being deep in talk, it so
happened that they found themselves near the majestic, pillared portico,
and huge, black rotundity of the Pantheon. It stands almost at the
central point of the labyrinthine intricacies of the modern city, and
often presents itself before the bewildered stranger, when he is in
search of other objects. Hilda, looking up, proposed that they should
enter.

"I never pass it without going in," she said, "to pay my homage at the
tomb of Raphael."

"Nor I," said Kenyon, "without stopping to admire the noblest edifice
which the barbarism of the early ages, and the more barbarous pontiffs
and princes of later ones, have spared to us."

They went in accordingly, and stood in the free space of that great
circle, around which are ranged the arched recesses and stately altars,
formerly dedicated to heathen gods, but Christianized through twelve
centuries gone by. The world has nothing else like the Pantheon. So
grand it is, that the pasteboard statues over the lofty cornice do not
disturb the effect, any more than the tin crowns and hearts, the dusty
artificial flowers, and all manner of trumpery gew-gaws, hanging at the
saintly shrines. The rust and dinginess that have dimmed the precious
marble on the walls; the pavement, with its great squares and rounds
of porphyry and granite, cracked crosswise and in a hundred directions,
showing how roughly the trouble