"I am a poor, weak girl, and have no such wisdom as you fancy in me." What further may have passed between these lovers, while standing before the pillared shrine, and the marble Madonna that marks Raphael's tomb; whither they had now wandered, we are unable to record.

But when the kneeling figure beneath the open eye of the Pantheon arose, she looked towards the pair and extended her hands with a gesture of benediction.
Then they knew that it was Miriam.

They suffered her to glide out of the portal, however, without a greeting; for those extended hands, even while they blessed, seemed to repel, as if Miriam stood on the other side of a fathomless abyss, and warned them from its verge.
So Kenyon won the gentle Hilda's shy affection, and her consent to be his bride.

Another hand must henceforth trim the lamp before the Virgin's shrine; for Hilda was coming down from her old tower, to be herself enshrined and worshipped as a household saint, in the light of her husband's fireside.

And, now that life had so much human promise in it, they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years, after all, have a kind of emptiness, when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore.