The orchard or meadow, through which their path lay, was already gray with twilight, though the western sky, where the greater stars were visible, was still afloat in crimson splendour.

The colour of all earthly things seemed repressed by the contrast, yet with a sense of great richness lingering in their shadows.

At that moment the voice of the singers, a "voice of joy and health," concentrated itself with solemn antistrophic movement, into an evening, or "candle" hymn.
"Hail! Heavenly Light, from his pure glory poured, Who is the Almighty Father, heavenly, blest:-- Worthiest art Thou, at all times to be sung With undefiled tongue."-- [105] It was like the evening itself made audible, its hopes and fears, with the stars shining in the midst of it.

Half above, half below the level white mist, dividing the light from the darkness, came now the mistress of this place, the wealthy Roman matron, left early a widow a few years before, by Cecilius "Confessor and Saint." With a certain antique severity in the gathering of the long mantle, and with coif or veil folded decorously below the chin, "gray within gray," to the mind of Marius her temperate beauty brought reminiscences of the serious and virile character of the best female statuary of Greece.

Quite foreign, however, to any Greek statuary was the expression of pathetic care, with which she carried a little child at rest in her arms.