The sultry day was ended; the sun had set. Far to the west on the Campagna the fever mists were drifting in pale haze, like the wraiths of the multitudes of dead whose dust made up the soil. The Anio, shrunken to a runlet in its bed, was slow and almost stagnant. The distant Tiber was discernible by the thread of fog which hung over its course. In the woods themselves the heat was noiseless and dusky and oppressive; the great ilex avenues looked black as the sacrificial groves of old. Yet never to him, not in April radiance or autumn glory, had the scene looked so fair. Evening closed in, an evening hot and heavy, without any moon or any breath of air, but he sat in a rapture of memory and of hope beside one of the large windows, of which the embrasure fronted the north. The light from his own oil lamp within shone on the marbles of the balustrade outside, and across a few yards of the rough grassland beyond it. Farther than that was all quite dark, for the heat-mists made the light of the stars dim. Now and then an owl flew by hooting; many had their dwelling in the roof; and scores of large bats rushed to and fro pursuing the invisible insect-life of the night. At any other time it might have struck him that the house was unusually silent; that there was not the noise of women’s chatter, or of men’s laughter and altercation, such as usually rose up from court and stable and outhouse when the day was done. All was so still that the place might have been a monastery, with every cell closed, and every friar sleeping. But at this moment of supreme happiness, happiness which seemed almost reunion, with that portrait in his hands, and under his eyes, and that vague, ineffable promise written for the future beneath it, he would have scarcely been sensible if the volcanic fires which slept under the tufa around had burst the soil and thundered through the woods. He was happy. Once more he was happy, in despite of exile, of poverty, of attainder, of ruin. Those fair eyes looked at him with the gaze he knew so well, and those fair lips said to him, “I am faithful.” IX. How long he had sat there since he had entered the chamber he did not know; he had had no consciousness of the old woman having entered the room with the lamp, and having told him that his dinner awaited him in the smaller room beyond. It was with difficulty that he roused himself to a perception of her voice, when she stood again at his elbow, and called him thrice in a low, shrill, startled voice. “Let me alone, my friend,” he said to her; “I am occupied--I do not need to dine.” “It is not that. Hearken!” said Caterina, and something in her tone awakened him to attention. “Sir--sir--there is no one in the house.” He turned and looked at her. “No one in the house? There must be some of the men--some of the women. Have they not supped?”