ipice?"

"Ah, no!" cried. Donatello, shrinking from the battlemented wall with a
face of horror. "I cling to life in a way which you cannot conceive; it
has been so rich, so warm, so sunny!--and beyond its verge, nothing
but the chilly dark! And then a fall from a precipice is such an awful
death!"

"Nay; if it be a great height," said Kenyon, "a man would leave his life
in the air, and never feel the hard shock at the bottom."

"That is not the way with this kind of death!" exclaimed Donatello, in a
low, horror-stricken voice, which grew higher and more full of emotion
as he proceeded. "Imagine a fellow creature,--breathing now, and looking
you in the face,--and now tumbling down, down, down, with a long shriek
wavering after him, all the way! He does not leave his life in the air!
No; but it keeps in him till he thumps against the stones, a horribly
long while; then he lies there frightfully quiet, a dead heap of bruised
flesh and broken bones! A quiver runs through the crushed mass; and no
more movement after that! No; not if you would give your soul to make
him stir a finger! Ah, terrible! Yes, yes; I would fain fling myself
down for the very dread of it, that I might endure it once for all, and
dream of it no more!"

"How forcibly, how frightfully you conceive this!" said the sculptor,
aghast at the passionate horror which was betrayed in the Count's words,
and still more in his wild gestures and ghastly look. "Nay, if the
height of your tower affects your imagination thus, you do wrong to
trust yourself here in solitude, and in the night-time, and at all
unguarded hours. You are not safe in your chamber. It is but a step or
two; and what if a vivid dream should lead you up hither at midnight,
and act itself out as a reality!"

Donatello had hidden his face in his hands, and was leaning against the
parapet.

"No fear of that!" said he. "Whatever the dream may be, I am too genuine
a coward to act out my own death in it."

The paroxysm passed away, and the two friends continued their desultory
talk, very much as if no such interruption had occurred. Nevertheless,
it affected the sculptor with infinite pity to see this young man, who
had been born to gladness as an assured heritage, now involved in a
misty bewilderment of grievous thoughts, amid which he seemed to go
staggering blindfold. Kenyon, not without an unshaped suspicion of
the definite fact, knew that his condition must have resulted from the
weight