One word about the “Press” before we part. Just one word to note the elderly press-man, who is of a shrewd, parroty appearance, and who has sat in court so many years reporting, that his grey hair has at last taken the form, colour, and texture of a judge’s wig: his aspect is severe; he seems to have imbibed the spirit of that justice which he has passed his life in recording. Agnes of Sorrento. CHAPTER IX. THE ARTIST MONK. On the evening when Agnes and her grandmother had returned from the convent, as they were standing after their supper looking over the garden parapet into the gorge, their attention was caught by a man in an ecclesiastical habit, slowly climbing the rocky pathway towards them. “Isn’t that brother Antonio?” asked Dame Elsie, leaning forward to observe more narrowly. “Yes, to be sure it is.” “Oh, how glad I am!” exclaimed Agnes, springing up with vivacity, and looking eagerly down the path by which the stranger was approaching. A few moments more of clambering, and the stranger met the two women at the gate with a gesture of benediction. He was apparently a little past the middle point of life, and entering on its shady afternoon. He was tall and well proportioned, and his features had the spare delicacy of the Italian outline. The round brow fully developed in all the perceptive and æsthetic regions, the keen eye shadowed by long dark lashes, the thin flexible lips, the sunken cheek, where on the slightest emotion there fluttered a brilliant flush of colour,—all were signs telling of the enthusiast in whom the nervous and spiritual predominated over the animal. At times, his eye had a dilating brightness, as if from the flickering of some inward fire which was slowly consuming the mortal part, and its expression was brilliant even to the verge of insanity. His dress was the simple, coarse, white stuff gown of the Dominican friars, over which he wore a darker travelling garment of coarse cloth, with a hood, from whose deep shadows his bright mysterious eyes looked like jewels from a cavern. At his side dangled a great rosary and cross of black wood, and under his arm he carried a portfolio secured with a leathern strap, which seemed stuffed to bursting with papers. Father Antonio, whom we have thus introduced to the reader, was a travelling preaching monk from the convent of San Marco in Florence, on a pastoral and artistic tour through Italy.