In a few moments they vanished from him, as dreams and spectres do, leaving him at liberty to pursue his quest, with no impediment except the crowd that blocked up the footway.
He had not gone far when the peasant and the contadina met him.

They were still hand in hand, and appeared to be straying through the grotesque and animated scene, taking as little part in it as himself.

It might be because he recognized them, and knew their solemn secret, that the sculptor fancied a melancholy emotion to be expressed by the very movement and attitudes of these two figures; and even the grasp of their hands, uniting them so closely, seemed to set them in a sad remoteness from the world at which they gazed.
"I rejoice to meet you," said Kenyon.

But they looked at him through the eye-holes of their black masks, without answering a word.
"Pray give me a little light on the matter which I have so much at heart," said he; "if you know anything of Hilda, for Heaven's sake, speak!" Still they were silent; and the sculptor began to imagine that he must have mistaken the identity of these figures, there being such a multitude in similar costume.

Yet there was no other Donatello, no other Miriam.