e to some kind of work was a different question; but of
course he would come back, if it were only to say that he had kept his
promise, but found he must set off again to some place or other.
Mallard dreaded his coming. News of some kind he would bring, and
Mallard's need was of silence. If he indeed remained here, the old
irritation would revive and go on from day to day. Impossible that they
should live together long.

It was pretty certain by what train he would journey from Naples to
Salerno; easy, therefore, to calculate the probable hour of his arrival
at Amalfi. When that hour drew near, Mallard set out to walk a short
distance along the road, to meet him. Unlike the Sorrento side of the
promontory, the mountains here rise suddenly and boldly out of the sea,
towering to craggy eminences, moulded and cleft into infinite variety
of slope and precipice, bastion and gorge. Cut upon the declivity,
often at vast sheer height above the beach, the road follows the
curving of the hills. Now and then it makes a deep loop inland, on the
sides of an impassable chasm; and set in each of these recesses is a
little town, white-gleaming amid its orchard verdure, with quaint and
many-coloured campanile, with the semblance of a remote time. Far up on
the heights are other gleaming specks, villages which seem utterly
beyond the traffic of man, solitary for ever in sun or mountain mist.

Mallard paid little heed to the things about him; he walked on and on,
watching for a vehicle, listening for the tread of horses. Sometimes he
could see the white road-track miles away, and he strained his eyes in
observing it. Twice or thrice he was deceived; a carriage came towards
him, and with agitation he waited to see its occupants, only to be
disappointed by strange faces.

There are few things more pathetic than persistency in hope due to
ignorance of something that has befallen beyond our ken. It is one of
those instances of the irony inherent in human fate which move at once
to tears and bitter laughter; the waste of emotion, the involuntary
folly, the cruel deception caused by limit of faculties--how they
concentrate into an hour or a day the essence of life itself!

He walked on and on; as well do this as go back and loiter fretfully at
the hotel. He got as far as the Capo d' Orso, the headland half-way
between Amalfi and Salerno, and there sat down by the wayside to rest.
From this point Salerno was first visible, in the far distance