arriage. They trod through the streets of Rome, as if they,
too, were among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ages
long gone by, have haunted the blood-stained city. And, at Miriam's
suggestion, they turned aside, for the sake of treading loftily past the
old site of Pompey's Forum.

"For there was a great deed done here!" she said,--"a deed of blood
like ours! Who knows but we may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity of
Caesar's murderers, and exchange a salutation?"

"Are they our brethren, now?" asked Donatello.

"Yes; all of them," said Miriam,--"and many another, whom the world
little dreams of, has been made our brother or our sister, by what we
have done within this hour!"

And at the thought she shivered. Where then was the seclusion, the
remoteness, the strange, lonesome Paradise, into which she and her one
companion had been transported by their crime? Was there, indeed, no
such refuge, but only a crowded thoroughfare and jostling throng of
criminals? And was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain on
it,--or had poured out poison,--or strangled a babe at its birth,--or
clutched a grandsire's throat, he sleeping, and robbed him of his few
last breaths,--had now the right to offer itself in fellowship with
their two hands? Too certainly, that right existed. It is a terrible
thought, that an individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of
human crime, and makes us, who dreamed only of our own little separate
sin,--makes us guilty of the whole. And thus Miriam and her lover were
not an insulated pair, but members of an innumerable confraternity of
guilty ones, all shuddering at each other.

"But not now; not yet," she murmured to herself. "To-night, at least,
there shall be no remorse!"

Wandering without a purpose, it so chanced that they turned into a
street, at one extremity of which stood Hilda's tower. There was a
light in her high chamber; a light, too, at the Virgin's shrine; and the
glimmer of these two was the loftiest light beneath the stars. Miriam
drew Donatello's arm, to make him stop, and while they stood at some
distance looking at Hilda's window, they beheld her approach and throw
it open. She leaned far forth, and extended her clasped hands towards
the sky.

"The good, pure child! She is praying, Donatello," said Miriam, with a
kind of simple joy at witnessing the devoutness of her friend. Then her
own sin rushed upon her, and she shouted, with the rich strength of he