te would certainly make the worse speed.

"It is not spirit you lack, but sleep," said I; and she confessed
that it was so. An hour's rest would recover her, she said, and
obediently lay down where I found a couch for her on a bank of
sweet-smelling heath above the road. I too wanted rest, and settled
myself down with my back against a citron tree, some twenty paces
distant.

Chaucer says somewhere (and it is true), that women take less sleep
and take it more lightly than men. It seemed to me that I had
scarcely closed my eyes before I opened them again at a touch on my
shoulder. The night was yet dark around us, save for the glow to the
northward, and at first I would hardly believe when the Princess told
me that I had been sleeping near upon three hours. Then it occurred
to me that for a long while the sky overhead had been shaking and
repeating the boom of cannon.

"There is firing to the south of us," she said; "and heavier firing
than where the light is. It comes from Nonza or thereabouts."

"Then it is no affair of ours, even if we could reach it. But the
flame yonder will lead us to my father."

So we took the white glimmering high-road again and stepped out
briskly, refreshed by sleep and the cool night air that went with us,
blowing softly across the ridges on our right. We found a track that
skirted the village of Pino, leading us wide among orchards of citron
and olive, and had scarcely regained the road before the guns to the
south ceased firing. Also the red glow, though it still suffused the
north, began to fade as we neared it and climbed the last of steep
hills that run out to the extremity of the cape. There, upon the
summit, we came to a stand and caught our breath.

The sea lay at our feet, and down across its black floor to the base
of the cliff on which we stood there ran a broad ribbon of light.
It shone from a rock less than half a league distant: and on that
rock stood a castle which was a furnace--its walls black as the bars
of a grate, its windows aglow with contained fire. For the moment it
seemed that this fire filled the whole pile of masonry: but
presently, while we stood and stared, a sudden flame, shooting high
from the walls, lit up the front of a tall tower above them, with a
line of battlements at its base and on the battlements a range of
roofs yet intact. As though a slide had been opened and as rapidly
shut again, this vision of tower, roofs, battlements, gleamed