Oh, that divine melancholy of a spring evening! Felt even by happy souls, may it not be an inherited homesickness, transmitted through all the ages? A longing for the flowers, and perfumes, and joys of that eternal, albeit earthly, paradise which our first parents lost for us forever. Costantino tramped on and on: he had passed long years under a brutal oppression, between infected walls, amid corrupt companions in an environment whose very air was confined, and now--he was walking in the open, treading grass and stones under foot! As he ascended the mountain from the valley below, every step brought more of the horizon into view and a wider expanse of soft, overhanging sky as boundless as liberty itself. And yet,--and yet,--never in all those years of imprisonment had he experienced a sense of such utter hopelessness as that with which he now saw the shadows fall from those free skies. He was pressing on, but whither? and why? He had set forth eager, elated, as one hastening to a place where pleasant things await him. Now he wondered at himself. In the uncertain twilight he seemed to have lost his way; his journey had turned out to be vain, abortive. He was trudging on aimlessly; he had no country, nor home, nor family; he would never reach any destination; he had gone astray, and was wandering about in a boundless, desert tract, as grey and cheerless as the sky above him, where the stars were like camp-fires lighted by solitary travellers who, unknown to one another, wandered, lost like himself, in the unwished-for and oppressive liberty of the trackless wilderness. And yet it was not the actual thought of Giovanna herself that weighed him down, nor yet his lost happiness, nor the misery that a wholly undeserved fate had forced upon him; all these things had long ago so eaten into his soul that they had come to form a part of his very nature, and he had grown almost to forget them, as one forgets the shirt he has on his back. Now his grief fastened upon memories of certain specific objects which had passed out of the setting of his life, and which he could never recover. His mind dwelt, for instance, persistently on the little common in front of Giovanna's cottage, the stones in the old wall where they used to sit together on summer evenings, and above all on the great, wide bed, where he would lay himself down beside her after the hard day's work was over. He felt now as though he might be going home at the close of one of those long, toilsome days. But now--now--where was he to turn for rest and ease? Thus, up through the load of unhappiness that bore him down, all-pervading and indefinable as the fragrance of the wild growth about him, a sense of physical discomfort forced itself; he was conscious of hunger and weariness.