She started, with a thrill of pleasure, and took his arm.
The cathedral at Arezzo stands in the most elevated portion of the town.
Isabel was almost breathless with the rapidity of their walk, as they mounted the ascent, for Frederick hurried on in silence, urged forward, as it seemed, by the force of buried thoughts that had kept him silent all day.
The cathedral was seen just touched with the coming twilight when they entered it. A calm stillness hung around it, a stillness that seemed independent of the strain of music that swelled, rich with sacred sweetness, from one of the chapels.
They moved forward through the solemn twilight of the interior. The atmosphere without had been singularly transparent, but now many stained windows tinted it with gorgeous mistiness, and the shadows, as they gathered around the sculpture and ancient paintings, were broken with a soft purplish haze that was lifted in waves and eddies by the slow swell of the music.
The chapel from which these vesper hymns were stealing, was lighted up, and the tapers gleamed like flashes of starlight across that end of the edifice, rendering the gorgeous gloom in which they stood more palpable by contrast.
It was by this beautiful twilight alone that they approached the grand altar, and saw the carved foliage that lay upon it like incrustations of frozen music, left there more than five hundred years ago, when Geovanni Pisano gave his genius to religion.
Those young hearts had been swelling with poetic thoughts all the day, and now, surrounded by everything that could thrill the soul and delight the imagination, they stood hand in hand listening to the distant music.
Their fingers were woven together, and trembled with the electric shock of two souls thrilled with a worship of the beautiful, and the solemn poetry of the past.
Frederick felt Isabel's hand tremble in his; he bent down his head, clasping that little hand more tightly.