g passed the tower and the mouth
of the gorge which leads up to it from the westward, we came, almost
at nightfall, within sight of Pino by the sea.

Here I proposed that I should go forward to the village and find a
night's lodging for her, pointing out that, the night being warm and
dry, I could make my couch comfortably enough in one of the citron
orchards that here lined the road on the landward side. To this at
first she assented--it seemed to me, even eagerly. But I had
scarcely taken forty paces up the road before I heard her voice
calling me back, and back I went obediently.

"O husband," she said, "the dusk has fallen, and now in the dusk I
can say a word I have been longing all day to be free of. Nay"--she
put out a hand--"you must not forbid me. You must not even delay me
now."

"What is it, that I should forbid you?"

"It is--about Brussels."

I dropped my hand impatiently and was turning away, but she touched
my arm and the touch pleaded with me to face her.

"I have a right. . . . Yes, it was good of you to refuse it; but you
cannot go on refusing, because--see you--your goodness makes my right
the stronger. This morning I could have told you, but you refused
me. All this day I have known that refusal unjust."

"All this day? Then--pardon, Princess--but why should I hear you
now, at this moment?"

"The daylight is past," she said. "You can listen now and not see my
face."

On the hedge of the ditch beside the high-road lay a rough fragment
of granite, a stone cracked and discarded, once the base of an
olive-mill. She found a seat upon it and motioned to me to come
close, and I stood close, staring down on her while she stared down
at her feet, grey with dust almost as the road itself.

"We were children, Camillo and I," she said at length, "in keep of an
ill woman we called Maman Trebuchet, and in a house near the entrance
of a court leading off the Rue de la Madeleine and close beside the
Market. How we had come there we never inquired. . . . I suppose all
children take such things as they find them. The house was of five
storys, all let out in tenements, and we inhabited two rooms on the
fourth floor to the left as you went up the staircase. . . . Some of
the men quarrelled with their wives and beat them. There was always
a noise of quarrelling in the house: but outside, before the front
door, the men who were not beating their women would sit for hours
together and smoke and sp