orm-clouds in the heavens.
With the darkness, the stillness also deepened. Nothing broke that,
except an occasional motion of Baba or the pony, or an alert signal from
Capitan; then all seemed stiller than ever. Alessandro felt as if God
himself were in the canon. Countless times in his life before he had
lain in lonely places under the sky and watched the night through, but
he never felt like this. It was ecstasy, and yet it was pain. What was
to come on the morrow, and the next morrow, and the next, and the next,
all through the coming years? What was to come to this beloved and
loving woman who lay there sleeping, so confident, so trustful, guarded
only by him,--by him, Alessandro, the exile, fugitive, homeless man?

Before the dawn, wood-doves began their calling. The canon was full
of them, no two notes quite alike, it seemed to Alessandro's sharpened
sense; pair after pair, he fancied that he recognized, speaking and
replying, as did the pair whose voices had so comforted him the night he
watched under the geranium hedge by the Moreno chapel,--"Love?" "Here!"
"Love?" "Here!" They comforted him still more now. "They too have only
each other," he thought, as he bent his eyes lovingly on Ramona's face.

It was dawn, and past dawn, on the plains, before it was yet morning
twilight in the canon; but the birds in the upper boughs' of the
sycamores caught the tokens of the coming day, and began to twitter in
the dusk. Their notes fell on Ramona's sleeping ear, like the familiar
sound of the linnets in the veranda-thatch at home, and waked her
instantly. Sitting up bewildered, and looking about her, she exclaimed,
"Oh, is it morning already, and so dark? The birds can see more sky than
we! Sing, Alessandro," and she began the hymn:--

"'Singers at dawn From the heavens above People all regions; Gladly we
too sing.'"

Never went up truer invocation, from sweeter spot.

"Sing not so loud, my Majel," whispered Alessandro, as her voice went
carolling like a lark's in the pure ether. "There might be hunters near
who would hear;" and he joined in with low and muffled tones.

As she dropped her voice at this caution, it seemed even sweeter than
before:--

"'Come, O sinners,
Come, and we will sing
Tender hymns
To our refuge,'"

"Ah, Majella, there is no sinner here, except me!" said Alessandro. "My
Majella is like one of the Virgin's own saints." And indeed he might
have been forgiven the thought as