y dropped from an impending bough, and alighted
at her side. It was as if the swaying of the branches had let a ray
of sunlight through. The same ray likewise glimmered among the gloomy
meditations that encompassed Miriam, and lit up the pale, dark beauty of
her face, while it responded pleasantly to Donatello's glance.

"I hardly know," said she, smiling, "whether you have sprouted out of
the earth, or fallen from the clouds. In either case you are welcome."

And they walked onward together.

CHAPTER IX

THE FAUN AND NYMPH

Miriam's sadder mood, it might be, had at first an effect on Donatello's
spirits. It checked the joyous ebullition into which they would
otherwise have effervesced when he found himself in her society, not, as
heretofore, in the old gloom of Rome, but under that bright soft sky and
in those Arcadian woods. He was silent for a while; it being, indeed,
seldom Donatello's impulse to express himself copiously in words. His
usual modes of demonstration were by the natural language of gesture,
the instinctive movement of his agile frame, and the unconscious play
of his features, which, within a limited range of thought and emotion,
would speak volumes in a moment.

By and by, his own mood seemed to brighten Miriam's, and was reflected
back upon himself. He began inevitably, as it were, to dance along
the wood-path; flinging himself into attitudes of strange comic grace.
Often, too, he ran a little way in advance of his companion, and then
stood to watch her as she approached along the shadowy and sun-fleckered
path. With every step she took, he expressed his joy at her nearer
and nearer presence by what might be thought an extravagance of
gesticulation, but which doubtless was the language of the natural man,
though laid aside and forgotten by other men, now that words have been
feebly substituted in the place of signs and symbols. He gave Miriam the
idea of a being not precisely man, nor yet a child, but, in a high and
beautiful sense, an animal, a creature in a state of development less
than what mankind has attained, yet the more perfect within itself
for that very deficiency. This idea filled her mobile imagination with
agreeable fantasies, which, after smiling at them herself, she tried to
convey to the young man.

"What are you, my friend?" she exclaimed, always keeping in mind his
singular resemblance to the Faun of the Capitol. "If you are, in good
truth, that wild and pleasant c