He got out of the boat and walked up the
road, and the man crossed his fingers in superstitious fright, muttered
a prayer to the river-gods against ill luck, and let him go.

Once started again, Nicanor walked all that day, and at nightfall
reached Corinium, five and twenty miles away. Here his overwrought
strength gave out, and he slept as the dead sleep, in the fields outside
the town. Hours before dawn he woke, haunted by the demon of unrest
which rode him, begged food and a cup of milk at a farmhouse by the
road, and started on again. All that day he walked, a mere machine
dominated by a force which would drive it forward to the very verge of
dissolution; and in the late evening he reached Cunetio. Here he did not
know when he stopped, for he went to sleep on his feet, and woke and
found himself on his back by the roadside, with the sun at high noon.
Desperate for the time he had lost, he hastened on, and in an hour came
upon one of the small stations threaded along the high-roads between
towns which were more than ten Roman miles apart, kept as taverns by
_diversores_ for the entertainment of travellers. There were folk
stopping here, for outside the inn door stood horses, saddled and
tethered. Nicanor selected the animal which best pleased him,--a tall
roan,--mounted, and rode away without so much as a glance behind him for
pursuit.

After that his way was easier. He met people, who stared at him and
sometimes asked questions which he heard himself answering. Dimly,
without at all taking it in, he understood that they were vastly excited
about something, but it was not worth while to ask questions on his own
account. They were mere shadows, without substance, which drifted by and
were forgotten; only he and his desire in all the world were real. So he
reached Calleva, in the open country amid the heather, where he stopped
for an hour for food and to rest his horse. On again then for fifteen
miles, and he rode through the station of Bibracte, and turned aside
into the oak-lined by-road for the last ten miles of his journey--miles
which stretched before him as the most endless of all. Again excitement
burned in his veins like fever; he kicked his horse into a gallop which
more than once threatened life and limb. They pounded up the last slope
which hid the villa from view, spent horse and exhausted man, and gained
the rise. And Nicanor flung the roan back upon its haunches with a jerk
which all but broke its jaw.