e traveller stepped out of his clear circle of illumined values into
the shrouded dusk of the old accustomed mystery, and the road ran faint
to his eyes through a blurred land, and he had perforce to take up
again the quest of the way step by step. Reality, for a lucid space of
time emerging, had slipped again behind the shadow-veils. The ranks of
the wan olives, waiting silently for dawn, held and hid their secret.

The other traveller murmured, "How many tones of grey do you suppose
there are in an olive tree when the moon has set? But there'll be more
presently. Listen...."

The little wind that comes before the dawn stirred and shivered, and
disquieted the silence of the dim woods. Peter knew how the stirred
leaves would be shivering white, only in the dark twilight one could not
see.

The dusk paled and paled. Soon one would catch the silver of up-turned
leaves.

On the soft deep dust the treading feet of the travellers moved quietly.
One walked with a light unevenness, a slight limp.

CHAPTER V

THE SPLENDID MORNING

"Listen," said Peter again; and some far off thing was faintly jarring
the soft silence, on a crescendo note.

Rodney listened, and murmured, "Brute." He hated them more than Peter
did. He was less wide-minded and less sweet-tempered. Peter had a gentle
and not intolerant aesthetic aversion, Rodney a fervid moral indignation.

It came storming over the rims of twilight out of an unborn dawn, and the
soft dust surged behind. Its eyes flamed, and lit the pale world. It was
running to the city in the dim west; it was in a hurry; it would be there
for breakfast. As it ran it played the opening bars of something of
Tchaichowsky's.

Rodney and Peter leant over the low white wall and gazed into grey
shivering gardens. So could they show aloof contempt; so could they
elude the rioting dust.

The storming took a diminuendo note; it slackened to a throbbing murmur.
The brute had stopped, and close to them. The brute was investigating
itself.

"Perhaps," Rodney hoped, but not sanguinely, "they'll have to push it all
the way to Florence." Still contempt withheld a glance.

Then a pleasant, soft voice broke the hushed dusk with half a laugh, and
Peter wheeled sharply about. The man who had laughed was climbing again
into his seat, saying, "It's quite all right." That remark was extremely
characteristic; it would have been a suitable motto for his whole career.

The next thing he said, in