hts, moreover, a hundred lamps had often gleamed
afar over the valley, suspended from the iron hooks that were ranged for
the purpose beneath the battlements and every window.

Connected with the tower, and extending behind it, there seemed to be
a very spacious residence, chiefly of more modern date. It perhaps owed
much of its fresher appearance, however, to a coat of stucco and
yellow wash, which is a sort of renovation very much in vogue with the
Italians. Kenyon noticed over a doorway, in the portion of the edifice
immediately adjacent to the tower, a cross, which, with a bell suspended
above the roof, indicated that this was a consecrated precinct, and the
chapel of the mansion.

Meanwhile, the hot sun so incommoded the unsheltered traveller, that he
shouted forth another impatient summons. Happening, at the same moment,
to look upward, he saw a figure leaning from an embrasure of the
battlements, and gazing down at him.

"Ho, Signore Count!" cried the sculptor, waving his straw hat, for he
recognized the face, after a moment's doubt. "This is a warm reception,
truly! Pray bid your porter let me in, before the sun shrivels me quite
into a cinder."

"I will come myself," responded Donatello, flinging down his voice out
of the clouds, as it were; "old Tomaso and old Stella are both asleep,
no doubt, and the rest of the people are in the vineyard. But I have
expected you, and you are welcome!"

The young Count--as perhaps we had better designate him in his ancestral
tower--vanished from the battlements; and Kenyon saw his figure
appear successively at each of the windows, as he descended. On every
reappearance, he turned his face towards the sculptor and gave a nod and
smile; for a kindly impulse prompted him thus to assure his visitor of a
welcome, after keeping him so long at an inhospitable threshold.

Kenyon, however (naturally and professionally expert at reading the
expression of the human countenance), had a vague sense that this was
not the young friend whom he had known so familiarly in Rome; not the
sylvan and untutored youth, whom Miriam, Hilda, and himself had liked,
laughed at, and sported with; not the Donatello whose identity they had
so playfully mixed up with that of the Faun of Praxiteles.

Finally, when his host had emerged from a side portal of the mansion,
and approached the gateway, the traveller still felt that there was
something lost, or something gained (he hardly knew which), that se