it now it was a grim
place, too."

The sculptor looked more attentively at the young man, and was surprised
and alarmed to observe how entirely the fine, fresh glow of animal
spirits had departed out of his face. Hitherto, moreover, even while he
was standing perfectly still, there had been a kind of possible gambol
indicated in his aspect. It was quite gone now. All his youthful gayety,
and with it his simplicity of manner, was eclipsed, if not utterly
extinct.

"You are surely ill, my dear fellow," exclaimed Kenyon.

"Am I? Perhaps so," said Donatello indifferently; "I never have been
ill, and know not what it may be."

"Do not make the poor lad fancy-sink," whispered Miriam, pulling the
sculptor's sleeve. "He is of a nature to lie down and die at once, if he
finds himself drawing such melancholy breaths as we ordinary people are
enforced to burden our lungs withal. But we must get him away from this
old, dreamy and dreary Rome, where nobody but himself ever thought of
being gay. Its influences are too heavy to sustain the life of such a
creature."

The above conversation had passed chiefly on the steps of the
Cappuccini; and, having said so much, Miriam lifted the leathern curtain
that hangs before all church-doors in italy. "Hilda has forgotten her
appointment," she observed, "or else her maiden slumbers are very sound
this morning. We will wait for her no longer."

They entered the nave. The interior of the church was of moderate
compass, but of good architecture, with a vaulted roof over the nave,
and a row of dusky chapels on either side of it instead of the customary
side-aisles. Each chapel had its saintly shrine, hung round with
offerings; its picture above the altar, although closely veiled, if by
any painter of renown; and its hallowed tapers, burning continually, to
set alight the devotion of the worshippers. The pavement of the nave was
chiefly of marble, and looked old and broken, and was shabbily patched
here and there with tiles of brick; it was inlaid, moreover, with
tombstones of the mediaeval taste, on which were quaintly sculptured
borders, figures, and portraits in bas-relief, and Latin epitaphs,
now grown illegible by the tread of footsteps over them. The church
appertains to a convent of Capuchin monks; and, as usually happens when
a reverend brotherhood have such an edifice in charge, the floor seemed
never to have been scrubbed or swept, and had as little the aspect of
sanctity as a