They recognized the voices which, a little while ago, had accorded and sung in cadence with their own.

But they were familiar voices no more; they sounded strangely, and, as it were, out of the depths of space; so remote was all that pertained to the past life of these guilty ones, in the moral seclusion that had suddenly extended itself around them.

But 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.