atever he purposed
he must have meant to do quickly, before we two should return to the
camp--"

"He had mischief in his heart, I will swear," assented Stephanu,
after a glance at me and another at Marc'antonio, who reassured him
with a nod. "And that the Princess plainly guessed, by her manner at
parting, when I set out with the man Priske. She was sorry enough
then to say good-bye to me," he added, half boastfully.

"Nevertheless," answered Marc'antonio with some sarcasm, "she appears
to have neglected to confide to you what she feared."

Stephanu spread out his hands. "The Prince, and the reverend
Father--who can tell what passes in their minds?"

"Not you, at any rate! Very well, then--the Princess was
apprehensive. . . . Yet now, when the mischief (whatever it is)
should either be done or on the point of doing, she will have none of
our help. Clearly she knows more, yet will have none of our help.
That is altogether puzzling to me. . . . And she sends us
north. . . . Very well again; we will go north, but not far!"

He glanced back at me over his shoulder. I read his meaning--that he
wished to plan his campaign privately with Stephanu--and, reining in
my pony, I fell back out of earshot.

The pass towards which we were climbing stood perhaps three thousand
feet above the shore and the high road we had left; and the track,
when it reached the steeper slopes, ran in long zigzagging terraces
at the angles of which our ponies had sometimes to scramble up
stairways cut in the living rock. As the sun sank a light mist
gradually spread over the coast below us, the distant islands grew
dim, and we rode suspended, as it were, over a bottomless vale and a
sea without horizon. Slowly, out of these ghostly wastes, the moon
lifted herself in full circle, and her rays, crossing the cope of
heaven, lit up a tall grey crag on the ridge above us, and the stem
of a white-withered bush hanging from it--an isolated mass which
(my companions told me) marked the summit of the ascent.

"The path leads round the base of it," said Stephanu. "We shall
reach it in another twenty minutes."

"But will it not be guarded?" I asked.

He hunched his shoulders. "The Prince is no general. A hundred
times our enemies might have destroyed us; but they prefer to leave
us alone. It is more humiliating."

Marc'antonio rode forward deep in thought, his chin sunk upon his
breast. At the summit, under the shadow of the great rock,