of the
thicket beheld Donatello fling himself on the ground.

Emerging from his hiding-place, he saw no living thing, save a brown
lizard (it was of the tarantula species) rustling away through the
sunshine. To all present appearance, this venomous reptile was the only
creature that had responded to the young Count's efforts to renew his
intercourse with the lower orders of nature.

"What has happened to you?" exclaimed Kenyon, stooping down over his
friend, and wondering at the anguish which he betrayed.

"Death, death!" sobbed Donatello. "They know it!"

He grovelled beside the fountain, in a fit of such passionate sobbing
and weeping, that it seemed as if his heart had broken, and spilt its
wild sorrows upon the ground. His unrestrained grief and childish tears
made Kenyon sensible in how small a degree the customs and restraints of
society had really acted upon this young man, in spite of the quietude
of his ordinary deportment. In response to his friend's efforts to
console him, he murmured words hardly more articulate than the strange
chant which he had so recently been breathing into the air.

"They know it!" was all that Kenyon could yet distinguish,--"they know
it!"

"Who know it?" asked the sculptor. "And what is it their know?" "They
know it!" repeated Donatello, trembling. "They shun me! All nature
shrinks from me, and shudders at me! I live in the midst of a curse,
that hems me round with a circle of fire! No innocent thing can come
near me."

"Be comforted, my dear friend," said Kenyon, kneeling beside him. "You
labor under some illusion, but no curse. As for this strange, natural
spell, which you have been exercising, and of which I have heard before,
though I never believed in, nor expected to witness it, I am satisfied
that you still possess it. It was my own half-concealed presence, no
doubt, and some involuntary little movement of mine, that scared away
your forest friends."

"They are friends of mine no longer," answered Donatello.

"We all of us, as we grow older," rejoined Kenyon, "lose somewhat of our
proximity to nature. It is the price we pay for experience."

"A heavy price, then!" said Donatello, rising from the ground. "But we
will speak no more of it. Forget this scene, my dear friend. In your
eyes, it must look very absurd. It is a grief, I presume, to all men, to
find the pleasant privileges and properties of early life departing from
them. That grief has now befallen me. Well;