how close, and ever closer, did the breath of the immeasurable waste,
that lay between them and all brotherhood or sisterhood, now press them
one within the other!

"O friend!" cried Miriam, so putting her soul into the word that it
took a heavy richness of meaning, and seemed never to have been spoken
before, "O friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this companionship
that knits our heart-strings together?"

"I feel it, Miriam," said Donatello. "We draw one breath; we live one
life!"

"Only yesterday," continued Miriam; "nay, only a short half-hour ago,
I shivered in an icy solitude. No friendship, no sisterhood, could come
near enough to keep the warmth within my heart. In an instant all is
changed! There can be no more loneliness!"

"None, Miriam!" said Donatello.

"None, my beautiful one!" responded Miriam, gazing in his face, which
had taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect, from the strength of
passion. "None, my innocent one! Surely, it is no crime that we have
committed. One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cement
two other lives for evermore."

"For evermore, Miriam!" said Donatello; "cemented with his blood!"

The young man started at the word which he had himself spoken; it may be
that it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, what he had
not before dreamed of,--the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a union
that consists in guilt. Cemented with blood, which would corrupt and
grow more noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the less
strictly for that.

"Forget it! Cast it all behind you!" said Miriam, detecting, by her
sympathy, the pang that was in his heart. "The deed has done its office,
and has no existence any more."

They flung the past behind them, as she counselled, or else distilled
from it a fiery, intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly
through those first moments of their doom. For guilt has its moment of
rapture too. The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic
sense of freedom. And thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark
sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an
insanity, which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy
innocence that was forever lost to them.

As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they went
onward, not stealthily, not fearfully, but with a stately gait and
aspect. Passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief
nobility of c