loneliness! It enveloped her whithersoever she went. It was a shadow in the sunshine of festal days; a mist between her eyes and the pictures at which she strove to look; a chill dungeon, which kept her in its gray twilight and fed her with its unwholesome air, fit only for a criminal to breathe and pine in! She could not escape from it. In the effort to do so, straying farther into the intricate passages of our nature, she stumbled, ever and again, over this deadly idea of mortal guilt.

Poor sufferer for another's sin! Poor wellspring of a virgin's heart, into which a murdered corpse had casually fallen, and whence it could not be drawn forth again, but lay there, day after day, night after night, tainting its sweet atmosphere with the scent of crime and ugly death!

The strange sorrow that had befallen Hilda did not fail to impress its mysterious seal upon her face, and to make itself perceptible to sensitive observers in her manner and carriage. A young Italian artist, who frequented the same galleries which Hilda haunted, grew deeply interested in her expression. One day, while she stood before Leonardo da Vinci's picture of Joanna of Aragon, but evidently without seeing it, - for, though it had attracted her eyes, a fancied resemblance to Miriam had immediately drawn away her thoughts, this artist drew a hasty sketch which he afterwards elaborated into a finished portrait. It represented Hilda as gazing with sad and earnest horror at a blood-spot which she seemed just then to have discovered on her white robe. The picture attracted considerable notice. Copies of an engraving from it may still be found in the print-shops along the Corso. By many connoisseurs, the idea of the face was supposed to have been suggested by the portrait of Beatrice Cenci; and, in fact, there was a look some

hat similar to poor Beatrice's forlorn gaze out of the reary isolation and remoteness, in which a terrible doom ad involved a tender soul. But the modern artist trenuously upheld the originality of his own picture, as vell as the stainless purity of its subject, and chose to all it and was laughed at for his pains

ying of a blood-stain!"

"Innocence,

"Your picture, Signor Panini, does you credit," remarked the picture-dealer, who had bought it of the oung man for fifteen scudi, and afterwards sold it for ten imes the sum; "but it would be worth a better price if ou had given it a more intelligible title. Looking at The face and expression of this fair signorina, we seem to omprehend readily enough, that she is undergoing one r another of those troubles of the heart to which young adies are but too liable. But what is this blood-stain? And what has innocence to do with it? Has she stabbed Ler perfidious lover with a bodkin?"

"She! she commit a crime!" cried the young artist. Can you look at the innocent anguish in her face, and sk that question? No; but, as I read the mystery, a man has been slain in her presence, and the blood, spurtng accidentally on her white robe, has made a stain which eats into her life."

"Then, in the name of her patron saint," exclaimed he picture-dealer, "why don't she get the robe made white again at the expense of a few baiocchi to her rasher-woman? No, no, my dear Panini. The picture eing now my property, I shall call it 'The Signorina's Vengeance.' She has stabbed her lover overnight, and 3 repenting it betimes the next morning. So interpreted, he picture becomes an intelligible and very natural repesentation of a not uncommon fact."

Thus coarsely does the world translate all finer griefs that meet its eye. It is more a coarse world than an unkind one.

But Hilda sought nothing either from the world's delicacy or its pity, and never dreamed of its misinterpretations. Her doves often flew in through the windows of the tower, winged messengers, bringing her what sympathy they could, and uttering soft, tender, and complaining sounds, deep in their bosoms, which soothed the girl more than a distincter utterance might. And sometimes Hilda moaned quietly among the doves, teaching her voice to accord with theirs, and thus finding a temporary relief from the burden of her incommunicable sorrow, as if a little portion of it, at least, had been told to these innocent friends, and been understood and pitied.

When she trimmed the lamp before the Virgin's shrine, Hilda gazed at the sacred image, and, rude as was the workmanship, beheld, or fancied, expressed with the quaint, powerful simplicity which sculptors sometimes had five hundred years ago, a woman's tenderness responding to her gaze. If she knelt, if she prayed, if her oppressed heart besought the sympathy of divine womanhood afar in bliss, but not remote, because forever humanized by the memory of mortal griefs, was Hilda to be blamed? It was not a Catholic kneeling at an idolatrous shrine, but a child lifting its tear-stained face to seek comfort from a mother.

ILDA descended, day by day, from her dovecote, and went to one or another of the great,

old palaces, - the Pamfili Doria, the Corsini, e Sciarra, the Borghese, the Colonna, -- where the Dorkeepers knew her well, and offered her a kindly reeting. But they shook their heads and sighed, on Oserving the languid step with which the poor girl iled up the grand marble staircases. There was no ore of that cheery alacrity with which she used to flit ward, as if her doves had lent her their wings, nor of at glow of happy spirits which had been wont to set e tarnished gilding of the picture-frames and the shabby lendor of the furniture all a-glimmer, as she hastened her congenial and delightful toil.

An old German artist, whom she often met in the alleries, once laid a paternal hand on Hilda's head, ad bade her go back to her own country.

"Go back soon," he said, with kindly freedom and rectness, "or you will go never more. And, if you not, why, at least, do you spend the whole summerme in Rome? The air has been breathed too often, in ■ many thousand years, and is not wholesome for a little foreign flower like you, my child, a delicate wood-anemone from the western forest-land."

"I have no task nor duty anywhere but here," replied Hilda. "The old masters will not set me free!"

"Ah, those old masters!" cried the veteran artist, shaking his head. "They are a tyrannous race! You will find them of too mighty a spirit to be dealt with, for long together, by the slender hand, the fragile mind, and the delicate heart, of a young girl. Remember that Raphael's genius wore out that divinest painter before half his life was lived. Since you feel his influence powerfully enough to reproduce his miracles so well, it will assuredly consume you like a flame."

"That might have been my peril once," answered Hilda. "It is not so now."

"Yes, fair maiden, you stand in that peril now!" insisted the kind old man; and he added, smiling, yet in a melancholy vein, and with a German grotesqueness of idea, "Some fine morning, I shall come to the Pinacotheca of the Vatican, with my palette and my brushes, and shall look for my little American artist that sees into the very heart of the grand pictures! And what shall I behold? A heap of white ashes on the marble floor, just in front of the divine Raphael's picture of the Madonna da Foligno! Nothing more, upon my word! The fire, which the poor child feels so fervently, will have gone into her innermost, and burnt her quite up!"

"It would be a happy martyrdom!" said Hilda, faintly smiling. "But I am far from being worthy of it. What troubles me much, among other troubles, is quite the reverse of what you think. The old masters hold me here, it is true, but they no longer warm me with their influence. It is not flame consuming, but torpor chilling me, that helps to make me wretched."