The Dead Capuchin

The sculptor was standing at the foot of the bier, and had not yet seen
the monk's features.

"Those naked feet!" said he. "I know not why, but they affect me
strangely. They have walked to and fro over the hard pavements of Rome,
and through a hundred other rough ways of this life, where the monk went
begging for his brotherhood; along the cloisters and dreary corridors
of his convent, too, from his youth upward! It is a suggestive idea, to
track those worn feet backward through all the paths they have trodden,
ever since they were the tender and rosy little feet of a baby, and
(cold as they now are) were kept warm in his mother's hand."

As his companions, whom the sculptor supposed to be close by him, made
no response to his fanciful musing, he looked up, and saw them at the
head of the bier. He advanced thither himself.

"Ha!" exclaimed he.

He cast a horror-stricken and bewildered glance at Miriam, but withdrew
it immediately. Not that he had any definite suspicion, or, it may be,
even a remote idea, that she could be held responsible in the least
degree for this man's sudden death. In truth, it seemed too wild a
thought to connect, in reality, Miriam's persecutor of many past months
and the vagabond of the preceding night, with the dead Capuchin
of to-day. It resembled one of those unaccountable changes and
interminglings of identity, which so often occur among the personages
of a dream. But Kenyon, as befitted the professor of an imaginative art,
was endowed with an exceedingly quick sensibility, which was apt to give
him intimations of the true state of matters that lay beyond his actual
vision. There was a whisper in his ear; it said, "Hush!" Without asking
himself wherefore, he resolved to be silent as regarded the mysterious
discovery which he had made, and to leave any remark or exclamation
to be voluntarily offered by Miriam. If she never spoke, then let the
riddle be unsolved.