art!

'_October 4th._--I found no courage.

'Yesterday was so full of trifling incidents and great emotions, so
joyful and so sad, so strangely agitating that I am almost at a loss
when I try to remember it all. And yet all--all other recollections pale
and vanish before the one.

'After having visited the tower and admired the monstrance, we prepared
to return home at about half-past five. Francesca was tired and
preferred going back in the coach to getting on horseback again. We
followed them for a while, riding behind or beside them, while Delfina
and Muriella waved long flowering bulrushes at us, laughing and
threatening us with their splendid spears.

'The evening was calm, not a breath of wind stirred. The sun was sinking
behind the hill at Rovigliano in a sky all rosy-red, like a sunset in
the Far East.

'When we came in sight of the pine-wood, he suddenly said to me: "Shall
we ride through it?"

'The high road skirted the wood, describing a wide curve, at one part of
which it almost touched the sea-shore. The wood was already growing dark
and was full of deep-green twilight, but under the trees the pools
gleamed with a pure and intense light, like fragments of a sky far
fairer than the one above our heads.

'Without giving me time to answer, he said to Francesca, "We are going
to ride through the wood and shall join you at the other side, on the
high road, by the bridge"--and he reined in his horse.

'Why did I consent--why did I follow him? There was a sort of dazzle
before my eyes. I felt as if I were under the influence of some nameless
fascination, as if the landscape, the light, this incident, the whole
combination of circumstances were not new to me, but things that had all
happened to me before, in another existence, and were now only being
repeated. The impression is quite indescribable. My will seemed
paralysed. It was as when some incident of one's life reappears in a
dream, but with added details that differ from the real circumstances. I
shall never be able to adequately describe even a part of this strange
phenomenon.

'We rode in silence at a foot's pace; the cawing of the rooks, the dull
beat of the horses' hoofs and their noisy breathing in no way disturbed
the all-pervading peace that seemed to grow every minute deeper and more
magical.

'Ah, why did he break the spell we ourselves had woven?

'He began to speak; he poured out upon me a flood of burning
words--words which, in the