word." He gazed sadly at her, but did not stir. "I tell
you," Miriam went on, "there is a great evil hanging over me! I know
it; I see it in the sky; I feel it in the air! It will overwhelm me
as utterly as if this arch should crumble down upon our heads! It will
crush you, too, if you stand at my side! Depart, then; and make the sign
of the cross, as your faith bids you, when an evil spirit is nigh. Cast
me off, or you are lost forever."

A higher sentiment brightened upon Donatello's face than had hitherto
seemed to belong to its simple expression and sensuous beauty.

"I will never quit you," he said; "you cannot drive me from you."

"Poor Donatello!" said Miriam in a changed tone, and rather to herself
than him. "Is there no other that seeks me out, follows me,--is
obstinate to share my affliction and my doom,--but only you! They call
me beautiful; and I used to fancy that, at my need, I could bring the
whole world to my feet. And lo! here is my utmost need; and my beauty
and my gifts have brought me only this poor, simple boy. Half-witted,
they call him; and surely fit for nothing but to be happy. And I accept
his aid! To-morrow, to-morrow, I will tell him all! Ah! what a sin to
stain his joyous nature with the blackness of a woe like mine!"

She held out her hand to him, and smiled sadly as Donatello pressed it
to his lips. They were now about to emerge from the depth of the arch;
but just then the kneeling pilgrim, in his revolution round the orbit of
the shrines, had reached the one on the steps of which Miriam had been
sitting. There, as at the other shrines, he prayed, or seemed to
pray. It struck Kenyon, however,--who sat close by, and saw his face
distinctly, that the suppliant was merely performing an enjoined
penance, and without the penitence that ought to have given it effectual
life. Even as he knelt, his eyes wandered, and Miriam soon felt that
he had detected her, half hidden as she was within the obscurity of the
arch.

"He is evidently a good Catholic, however," whispered one of the party.
"After all, I fear we cannot identify him with the ancient pagan who
haunts the catacombs."

"The doctors of the Propaganda may have converted him," said another;
"they have had fifteen hundred years to perform the task."

The company now deemed it time to continue their ramble. Emerging from
a side entrance of the Coliseum, they had on their left the Arch of
Constantine, and above it the shapeless ruins o