chin
pilgrim; but she was unused to going bareheaded and shoeless, and though
she held on bravely, the strong beams of the sun and the stony ways
warped her strength. She had to check fancies drawn from Arabian tales,
concerning the help sometimes given by genii of the air and enchanted
birds, that were so incessant and vivid that she found herself sulking
at the loneliness and helplessness of the visible sky, and feared that
her brain was losing its hold of things. Angelo led her to a half-shaded
hollow, where they finished the remainder of yesterday's meat and wine.
She set her eyes upon a gold-green lizard by a stone and slept.

'The quantity of sleep I require is unmeasured,' she said, a minute
afterwards, according to her reckoning of time, and expected to see
the lizard still by the stone. Angelo was near her; the sky was full of
colours, and the earth of shadows.

'Another day gone!' she exclaimed in wonderment, thinking that the days
of human creatures had grown to be as rapid and (save toward the one
end) as meaningless as the gaspings of a fish on dry land. He told her
that he had explored the country as far as he had dared to stray from
her. He had seen no habitation along the heights. The vale was too
distant for strangers to reach it before nightfall. 'We can make a
little way on,' said Vittoria, and the trouble of walking began again.
He entreated her more than once to have no fear. 'What can I fear?' she
asked. His voice sank penitently: 'You can rely on me fully when there
is anything to do for you.'

'I am sure of that,' she replied, knowing his allusion to be to his
frenzy of yesterday. In truth, no woman could have had a gentler
companion.

On the topmost ridge of the heights, looking over an interminable gulf
of darkness they saw the lights of the vale. 'A bird might find his
perch there, but I think there is no chance for us,' said Vittoria. 'The
moment we move forward to them the lights will fly back. It is their way
of behaving.'

Angelo glanced round desperately. Farther on along the ridge his eye
caught sight of a low smouldering fire. When he reached it he had a
great disappointment. A fire in the darkness gives hopes that men will
be at hand. Here there was not any human society. The fire crouched on
its ashes. It was on a little circular eminence of mossed rock; black
sticks, and brushwood, and dry fern, and split logs, pitchy to the
touch, lay about; in the centre of them the fire coil