with its silvery flax, lying
idly in her hands, and her widening dark eyes gazing intently into the
gloomy gorge below, from which arose the far-off complaining babble of
the brook at the bottom and the shiver and sigh of evening winds
through the trailing ivy. The white mist was slowly rising, wavering,
undulating, and creeping its slow way up the sides of the gorge. Now it
hid a tuft of foliage, and now it wreathed itself around a horned clump
of aloes, and, streaming far down below it in the dimness, made it seem
like the goblin robe of some strange, supernatural being.

The evening light had almost burned out in the sky: only a band of vivid
red lay low in the horizon out to sea, and the round full moon was just
rising like a great silver lamp, while Vesuvius with its smoky top began
in the obscurity to show its faintly flickering fires. A vague agitation
seemed to oppress the child; for she sighed deeply, and often repeated
with fervor the Ave Maria.

At this moment there began to rise from the very depths of the gorge
below her the sound of a rich tenor voice, with a slow, sad modulation,
and seeming to pulsate upward through the filmy, shifting mists. It was
one of those voices which seem fit to be the outpouring of some spirit
denied all other gifts of expression, and rushing with passionate fervor
through this one gate of utterance. So distinctly were the words spoken,
that they seemed each one to rise as with a separate intelligence out of
the mist, and to knock at the door of the heart.

Sad is my life, and lonely!
No hope for me,
Save thou, my love, my only,
I see!

Where art then, O my fairest?
Where art thou gone?
Dove of the rock, I languish
Alone!

They say thou art so saintly,
Who dare love thee?
Yet bend thine eyelids holy
On me!

Though heaven alone possess thee,
Thou dwell'st above,
Yet heaven, didst thou but know it,
Is love.

There was such an intense earnestness in these sounds, that large tears
gathered in the wide, dark eyes, and fell one after another upon the
sweet alyssum and maiden's-hair that grew in the crevices of the marble
wall. She shivered and drew away from the parapet, and thought of
stories she had heard the nuns tell of wandering spirits who sometimes
in lonesome places pour forth such entrancing music as bewilders the
brain of the unwary listener, and leads him to some fearful destruction.

"Agnes!" said the sharp voice of old Els