So saying, the man turned and began sliding and slipping down the steep ashy sides of the mountain cone with a dexterity which carried him to the bottom in a few moments; and on he went, sending back after him a cheerful little air, the refrain of which is still to be heard in our days in that neighborhood.  A word or two of the gay song fluttered back on the ear of the monk,—­

  “Tutta gieja, tutta festa.”

So gay and airy it was in its ringing cadence that it seemed a musical laugh springing from sunny skies, and came fluttering into the dismal smoke and gloom of the mountain-top like a very butterfly of sound.  It struck on the sad, leaden ear of the monk much as we might fancy the carol of a robin over a grave might seem, could the cold sleeper below wake one moment to its perception.  If it woke one regretful sigh and drew one wandering look downward to the elysian paradise that lay smiling at the foot of the mountain, he instantly suppressed the feeling, and set his face in its old deathly stillness.

CHAPTER XIX.

CLOUDS DEEPENING.

After the departure of her uncle to Florence, the life of Agnes was troubled and harassed from a variety of causes.

First, her grandmother was sulky and moody, and though saying nothing directly on the topic nearest her heart, yet intimating by every look and action that she considered Agnes as a most ungrateful and contumacious child.  Then there was a constant internal perplexity,—­a constant wearying course of self-interrogation and self-distrust, the pain of a sensitive spirit which doubts at every moment whether it may not be falling into sin.  The absence of her kind uncle at this time took from her the strongest support on which she had leaned in her perplexities.  Cheerful, airy, and elastic in his temperament, always full of fresh-springing and beautiful thoughts, as an Italian dell is of flowers, the charming old man seemed, while he stayed with Agnes, to be the door of a new and fairer world, where she could walk in air and sunshine, and find utterance for a thousand thoughts and feelings which at all other times lay in cold repression in her heart.  His counsels were always so wholesome, his sympathies so quick, his devotion so fervent and cheerful, that while with him Agnes felt the burden of her life insensibly lifted and carried for her as by some angel guide.

Now they had all come back upon her, heavier a thousand-fold than ever they had been before.  Never did she so much need counsel and guidance,—­never had she so much within herself to be solved and made plain to her own comprehension; yet she thought with a strange shiver of her next visit to her confessor.  That austere man, so chilling, so awful, so far above all conception of human weaknesses, how should she dare to lay before him all the secrets of her breast, especially when she must confess to having disobeyed