be killed!' He turned and went towards the table. Sarelli's
head was sunk on his arms, he was asleep. Harz methodically took up the
pistols, and put them back into the drawer. A sound made him turn his
head; there stood a tall, strong young woman in a loose gown caught
together on her chest. Her grey eyes glanced from the painter to the
bottles, from the bottles to the pistol-case. A simple reasoning, which
struck Harz as comic.

"It is often like this," she said in the country patois; "der Herr must
not be frightened."

Lifting the motionless Sarelli as if he were a baby, she laid him on a
couch.

"Ah!" she said, sitting down and resting her elbow on the table; "he will
not wake!"

Harz bowed to her; her patient figure, in spite of its youth and
strength, seemed to him pathetic. Taking up his knapsack, he went out.

The smoke of cottages rose straight; wisps of mist were wandering about
the valley, and the songs of birds dropping like blessings. All over the
grass the spiders had spun a sea of threads that bent and quivered to the
pressure of the air, like fairy tight-ropes.

All that day he tramped.

Blacksmiths, tall stout men with knotted muscles, sleepy eyes, and great
fair beards, came out of their forges to stretch and wipe their brows,
and stare at him.

Teams of white oxen, waiting to be harnessed, lashed their tails against
their flanks, moving their heads slowly from side to side in the heat.
Old women at chalet doors blinked and knitted.

The white houses, with gaping caves of storage under the roofs, the red
church spire, the clinking of hammers in the forges, the slow stamping of
oxen-all spoke of sleepy toil, without ideas or ambition. Harz knew it
all too well; like the earth's odour, it belonged to him, as Sarelli had
said.

Towards sunset coming to a copse of larches, he sat down to rest. It was
very still, but for the tinkle of cowbells, and, from somewhere in the
distance, the sound of dropping logs.

Two barefooted little boys came from the wood, marching earnestly along,
and looking at Harz as if he were a monster. Once past him, they began
to run.

'At their age,' he thought, 'I should have done the same.' A hundred
memories rushed into his mind.

He looked down at the village straggling below--white houses with russet
tiles and crowns of smoke, vineyards where the young leaves were
beginning to unfold, the red-capped spire, a thread of bubbling stream,
an old stone cross