hide themselves from a far antiquity downward. Or he might
have been a lunatic, fleeing instinctively from man, and making it his
dark pleasure to dwell among the tombs, like him whose awful cry echoes
afar to us from Scripture times.

And, as for the stranger's attaching himself so devotedly to Miriam, her
personal magnetism might be allowed a certain weight in the explanation.
For what remains, his pertinacity need not seem so very singular to
those who consider how slight a link serves to connect these vagabonds
of idle Italy with any person that may have the ill-hap to bestow
charity, or be otherwise serviceable to them, or betray the slightest
interest in their fortunes.

Thus little would remain to be accounted for, except the deportment of
Miriam herself; her reserve, her brooding melancholy, her petulance,
and moody passion. If generously interpreted, even these morbid symptoms
might have sufficient cause in the stimulating and exhaustive influences
of imaginative art, exercised by a delicate young woman, in the nervous
and unwholesome atmosphere of Rome. Such, at least, was the view of the
case which Hilda and Kenyon endeavored to impress on their own minds,
and impart to those whom their opinions might influence.

One of Miriam's friends took the matter sadly to heart. This was the
young Italian. Donatello, as we have seen, had been an eyewitness of
the stranger's first appearance, and had ever since nourished a singular
prejudice against the mysterious, dusky, death-scented apparition.
It resembled not so much a human dislike or hatred, as one of those
instinctive, unreasoning antipathies which the lower animals sometimes
display, and which generally prove more trustworthy than the acutest
insight into character. The shadow of the model, always flung into the
light which Miriam diffused around her, caused no slight trouble to
Donatello. Yet he was of a nature so remarkably genial and joyous, so
simply happy, that he might well afford to have something subtracted
from his comfort, and make tolerable shift to live upon what remained.

CHAPTER V

MIRIAM'S STUDIO

The courtyard and staircase of a palace built three hundred years ago
are a peculiar feature of modern Rome, and interest the stranger more
than many things of which he has heard loftier descriptions. You pass
through the grand breadth and height of a squalid entrance-way, and
perhaps see a range of dusky pillars, forming a sort of cloi