and why not?" I demanded. "If he can unite Corsica and win
her freedom, does he not deserve to be her king?"

Marc'antonio shook his head.

"Would your Prince Camillo make a better one?" I urged.

"It is a question of right, cavalier. I love this Paoli for
trouncing the Genoese; but for denying the Prince his rights I must
hate him, and especially for the grounds of his denial."

"Tell me those grounds precisely, Marc'antonio."

But he would not; and somehow I knew that they concerned the
Princess.

"Paoli is generous in that he leaves us in peace," he answered,
evading the question; "and I must hate him all the more for this,
because he spares us out of contempt."

"Yet," said I, musing, "that priest must have a card up his sleeve.
Rat that he looked, I cannot fancy him sticking to a ship until she
foundered."

Certainly we were left in peace. For any sign that reached to us
there, in our cup of he hills, the whole island might have been
desolate. The forest and the beasts in it, tame and wild,
belonged--so Marc'antonio informed me--to the Colonne; the slopes
between us and the sea to the lost great colony of Paomia.
No one disturbed us. Week followed week, yet since the Prince had
passed with his men no traveller came down the path which ran between
our hut and Nat's grave, over which the undergrowth already was
pushing its autumn shoots. Indeed, the path led no whither but to
the sea and the forsaken village. Twice a week Marc'antonio would
leave me for five or six hours and return with bread, and at whiles
with a bag of dried figs or a basket of cheeses and olives for
supplement. I learned that he purchased them in a _paese_ to the
southward, beyond the forest and beyond the ridge of the hills; but
he made a mystery of this, and I had to be content with his word that
in Corsica folk in the bush need never starve. Also, sometimes I
would hear his gun, and he would bring me home five or six brace of
blackbirds strung on a wand of osier; and these birds grew plumper
and made the better eating as autumn painted the arbutus with scarlet
berries.

To me, so long held a prisoner within the hut, this change of season
came with a shock upon the never-to-be-sufficiently-blessed day when
Marc'antonio, having examined and felt my bones and pronounced them
healed, lifted and bore me, as you might carry a child, up the path
to the old camp on the ridge. He was proud (good man) as he had a
right to be. Su