's very door, and the stream of gold
brown water, which her taste for color had kept flowing, all this
while, through her remembrance. O dreary streets, palaces, churches, and
imperial sepulchres of hot and dusty Rome, with the muddy Tiber eddying
through the midst, instead of the gold-brown rivulet! How she pined
under this crumbly magnificence, as if it were piled all upon her
human heart! How she yearned for that native homeliness, those familiar
sights, those faces which she had known always, those days that never
brought any strange event; that life of sober week-days, and a solemn
sabbath at the close! The peculiar fragrance of a flower-bed, which
Hilda used to cultivate, came freshly to her memory, across the windy
sea, and through the long years since the flowers had withered. Her
heart grew faint at the hundred reminiscences that were awakened by that
remembered smell of dead blossoms; it was like opening a drawer, where
many things were laid away, and every one of them scented with lavender
and dried rose-leaves.

We ought not to betray Hilda's secret; but it is the truth, that being
so sad, and so utterly alone, and in such great need of sympathy, her
thoughts sometimes recurred to the sculptor. Had she met him now, her
heart, indeed, might not have been won, but her confidence would have
flown to him like a bird to its nest. One summer afternoon, especially,
Hilda leaned upon the battlements of her tower, and looked over Rome
towards the distant mountains, whither Kenyon had told her that he was
going.

"O that he were here!" she sighed; "I perish under this terrible secret;
and he might help me to endure it. O that he were here!"

That very afternoon, as the reader may remember, Kenyon felt
Hilda's hand pulling at the silken cord that was connected with his
heart-strings, as he stood looking towards Rome from the battlements of
Monte Beni.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

ALTARS AND INCENSE

Rome has a certain species of consolation readier at hand, for all the
necessitous, than any other spot under the sun; and Hilda's despondent
state made her peculiarly liable to the peril, if peril it can justly be
termed, of seeking, or consenting, to be thus consoled.

Had the Jesuits known the situation of this troubled heart, her
inheritance of New England Puritanism would hardly have protected the
poor girl from the pious strategy of those good fathers. Knowing, as
they do, how to work each proper engine, it