there rose tufts of stone-pines with their dark
umbrella-tops towering above all other foliage, while far off in the
blue distance a silvery belt of glittering spangles showed where the sea
closed in the horizon-line. So high was the perch, so distant and dreamy
the prospect, that Agues felt a sensation of giddiness, as if she were
suspended over it in the air,--and turned away from the window, to look
again at what seemed to her the surprising and unheard-of splendors of
the apartment. There lay her simple peasant garb, on the rich velvet
couch,--a strange sight in the midst of so much luxury. Having dressed
herself, she sat down, and, covering her face with her hands, tried to
reflect calmly on the position in which she was placed.

With the education she had received, she could look on this strange
interruption of her pilgrimage only as a special assault upon her faith,
instigated by those evil spirits that are ever setting themselves in
conflict with the just. Such trials had befallen saints of whom she had
read. They had been assailed by visions of worldly ease and luxury
suddenly presented before them, for which they were tempted to deny
their faith and sell their souls. Was it not, perhaps, as a punishment
for having admitted the love of an excommunicated heretic into her
heart, that this sore trial had been permitted to come upon her? And if
she should fail? She shuddered, when she recalled the severe and
terrible manner in which Father Francesco had warned her against
yielding to the solicitations of an earthly love. To her it seemed as if
that holy man must have been inspired with a prophetic foresight of her
present position, and warned her against it. Those awful words came
burning into her mind as when they seemed to issue like the voice of a
spirit from the depths of the confessional:--"_If ever you should
yield to his love, and turn back from this heavenly marriage to follow
him, you will accomplish his damnation and your own_."

Agnes trembled in an agony of real belief, and with a vivid terror of
the world to come such as belonged to the almost physical certainty with
which the religious teaching of her time presented it to the popular
mind. Was she, indeed, the cause of such awful danger to his soul? Might
a false step now, a faltering human weakness, indeed plunge that soul,
so dear, into a fiery abyss without bottom or shore? Should she forever
hear his shrieks of torture and despair, his curses on t