when they reached the flight of steps leading downward from the capitol, there was a faroff noise of singing and laughter.swift, indeed, had been the rush of the crisis that was come and gone! this was still the merriment of the party that had so recently been their companions.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.in an instant all is changed!there can be no more loneliness!""none, miriam!"said donatello.
"none, my beautiful one!" responded miriam, gazing in his face, which had taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect, from the strength of passion."none, my innocent one! surely, it is no crime that we have committed.one wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cement two other lives for evermore.""for evermore, miriam!"said donatello; "cemented with his blood!" the young man started at the word which he had himself spoken; it may be that it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, what he had not before dreamed of,--the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a unionthat consists in guilt.cemented with blood, which would corrupt and grow more noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the less strictly for that.