"Ho, Signore Count!" cried the sculptor, waving his straw hat, for he
recognized the face, after a moment's doubt. "This is a warm reception,
truly! Pray bid your porter let me in, before the sun shrivels me quite
into a cinder."

"I will come myself," responded Donatello, flinging down his voice out
of the clouds, as it were; "old Tomaso and old Stella are both asleep,
no doubt, and the rest of the people are in the vineyard. But I have
expected you, and you are welcome!"

The young Count--as perhaps we had better designate him in his ancestral
tower--vanished from the battlements; and Kenyon saw his figure
appear successively at each of the windows, as he descended. On every
reappearance, he turned his face towards the sculptor and gave a nod and
smile; for a kindly impulse prompted him thus to assure his visitor of a
welcome, after keeping him so long at an inhospitable threshold.

Kenyon, however (naturally and professionally expert at reading the
expression of the human countenance), had a vague sense that this was
not the young friend whom he had known so familiarly in Rome; not the
sylvan and untutored youth, whom Miriam, Hilda, and himself had liked,
laughed at, and sported with; not the Donatello whose identity they had
so playfully mixed up with that of the Faun of Praxiteles.

Finally, when his host had emerged from a side portal of the mansion,
and approached the gateway, the traveller still felt that there was
something lost, or something gained (he hardly knew which), that set the
Donatello of to-day irreconcilably at odds with him of yesterday. His
very gait showed it, in a certain gravity, a weight and measure of step,
that had nothing in common with the irregular buoyancy which used to