He had been a man of the world, but in his Slav blood romance and superstition slumbered; he liked to see in that breaking light an augury of hope; yet what hope could there ever be for him more than for that old dead body which had been jammed down beneath the clay? His spirit was heavy as he rode home, and did not rise with the exhilarating speed of his young horse. The yawning ditch, the gabbled prayer, the battering spade, the loneliness, the decay, the sense of unenjoyed and unpitied lives coming to an end there in the clay, generation after generation, century after century, with no object, no hope, no mourner, went with him painfully. Were he to die that evening, such would be his own end. They would bring him there, and shovel him in, and go away, glad to be rid of him; and the land of his birth, the land of his love, would not be with him, even by so much as a handful of its soil thrown in upon him. “I grow nervous; that brave woman shames me,” he thought. IV. As the full moon rose over the eastern mountains that evening, coming from the unseen waves of the Adriatic Sea, the mule-cart was driven into the courtyard of the hunting-lodge as she had promised. She was alone in it; Lucio had slipped off when near the gates, and gone homewards by short cuts known to him across the woods. His heart was black against her with the rage of a wolf robbed of a fine meal off fawn or kid; he was thirsty to pour his chagrin into the yet blacker bosom of his elder brother. “Stop here to-night, child,” said old Caterina, coming out into the courtyard to greet her. “’Tis late, and you must be tired.” The girl demurred and resisted, but the old woman, who had known her as a swaddled baby, would take no denial. Cyrille came out of the great doorway, the light of the moon shining on his face, which looked to her so strange, so fair, so angelic, like the St Michael above a side altar in the Cathedral at her birthplace of Viterbo. She thought the stranger of another race, another humanity, to Lucio or herself. She had never seen a man so fair, so calm, so delicately pale, and yet so cool in courage as any tusked boar in the woods. She had noticed him much oftener and more curiously than he had noticed her; and she knew, as he did not know, the hate against him which smouldered in the breasts of all the people scattered through the solitudes of Le Selve. “Yes, rest here to-night,” he said, “we should be churls to let you go. Take her within, good Caterina.” Though her muscles were as steel, and her limbs as untiring as those of a deer’s, she was fatigued that night, and she did not care to sup off the black looks and bitter upbraidings of her uncles, who, to her, would make no secret of their disappointment and their rage. The old woman took her to the kitchen, and warmed, and fed, and welcomed her. “You are as strong as a man,” said Caterina enviously, for her own strength had also once been great.