with his cowl about his head and drawn partly over his face, and--well!
did I not tell you so?"

"I think," remarked Kenyon, "we can hardly be gazing at the same cloud.
What I behold is a reclining figure, to be sure, but feminine, and with
a despondent air, wonderfully well expressed in the wavering outline
from head to foot. It moves my very heart by something indefinable that
it suggests."

"I see the figure, and almost the face," said the Count; adding, in a
lower voice, "It is Miriam's!"

"No, not Miriam's," answered the sculptor. While the two gazers thus
found their own reminiscences and presentiments floating among the
clouds, the day drew to its close, and now showed them the fair
spectacle of an Italian sunset. The sky was soft and bright, but not so
gorgeous as Kenyon had seen it, a thousand times, in America; for there
the western sky is wont to be set aflame with breadths and depths of
color with which poets seek in vain to dye their verses, and which
painters never dare to copy. As beheld from the tower of Monte Beni, the
scene was tenderly magnificent, with mild gradations of hue and a lavish
outpouring of gold, but rather such gold as we see on the leaf of a
bright flower than the burnished glow of metal from the mine. Or, if
metallic, it looked airy and unsubstantial, like the glorified dreams
of an alchemist. And speedily--more speedily than in our own clime--came
the twilight, and, brightening through its gray transparency, the stars.

A swarm of minute insects that had been hovering all day round the
battlements were now swept away by the freshness of a rising breeze.
The two owls in the chamber beneath Donatello's uttered their soft
melancholy cry,--which, with national avoidance of harsh sounds, Italian
owls substitute for the hoot of their kindred in other countries,--and
flew darkling forth among the shrubbery. A convent bell rang out near at
hand, and was not only echoed among the hills, but answered by another
bell, and still another, which doubtless had farther and farther
responses, at various distances along the valley; for, like the English
drumbeat around the globe, there is a chain of convent bells from end
to end, and crosswise, and in all possible directions over priest-ridden
Italy.

"Come," said the sculptor, "the evening air grows cool. It is time to
descend."

"Time for you, my friend," replied the Count; and he hesitated a little
before adding, "I must keep a vigil here fo