glide out of
the portal, however, without a greeting; for those extended hands, even
while they blessed, seemed to repel, as if Miriam stood on the other
side of a fathomless abyss, and warned them from its verge.

So Kenyon won the gentle Hilda's shy affection, and her consent to
be his bride. Another hand must henceforth trim the lamp before the
Virgin's shrine; for Hilda was coming down from her old tower, to be
herself enshrined and worshipped as a household saint, in the light of
her husband's fireside. And, now that life had so much human promise in
it, they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years,
after all, have a kind of emptiness, when we spend too many of them on
a foreign shore. We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a
future moment, when we shall again breathe our native air; but, by and
by, there are no future moments; or, if we do return, we find that the
native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted
its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary
residents. Thus, between two countries, we have none at all, or
only that little space of either in which we finally lay down our
discontented bones. It is wise, therefore, to come back betimes, or
never.

Before they quitted Rome, a bridal gift was laid on Hilda's table. It
was a bracelet, evidently of great cost, being composed of seven ancient
Etruscan gems, dug out of seven sepulchres, and each one of them the
signet of some princely personage, who had lived an immemorial time ago.
Hilda remembered this precious ornament. It had been Miriam's; and once,
with the exuberance of fancy that distinguished her, she had amused
herself with telling a mythical and magic legend for each gem,
comprising the imaginary adventures and catastrophe of its former
wearer. Thus the Etruscan bracelet became the connecting bond of a
series of seven wondrous tales, all of which, as they were dug out of
seven sepulchres, were characterized by a sevenfold sepulchral gloom;
such as Miriam's imagination, shadowed by her own misfortunes, was wont
to fling over its most sportive flights.

And now, happy as Hilda was, the bracelet brought the tears into her
eyes, as being, in its entire circle, the symbol of as sad a mystery
as any that Miriam had attached to the separate gems. For, what was
Miriam's life to be? And where was Donatello? But Hilda had a hopeful
soul, and saw sunlight on the mountain-tops.