“I could not hide and fly like that,” answered Cyrille. “I am placed in charge here. I can only lay down my charge with my life.” Caterina nodded in approval, but sighed. “If you will not fly, they will have you before the night is passed. ’Tis a conspiracy of the whole Selve folk.” She knew nothing, but she had many memories, and she was a native of the woods. “Did they not poison your dog?” she added. When he had made all as secure as it was possible to make it (and he thought, except against explosives or petroleum, the doors would stand all night), he went up to an open loggia at the top of the building, with a dark lanthorn, and thence looked to all points of the compass. On a clear night he could see from the light at Palo on the west to the Sabine Hills and to Soracte on the east. Many a night in the full moonlight he had traced the profiles of the beautiful mountains lying like the silver waves of a phosphorescent sea. Now they were all hidden under a haze of heat and vapour; he could scarcely distinguish farther than the stone benches and balustrades immediately below, and the outlines of the nearest trees. The stillness was intense. Leaning against one of the columns of the loggia, invisible to anyone who might be below, he waited and listened. But the sense of the possible peril near was less realised by him than the knowledge of the happiness which had come across steppe and mountain, and plain and forest, to bring him its blessing. With all the tide of recovered hope coursing like warm wine through his veins, he could not believe that he was about to be besieged like a rat in his hole, hunted out like a fox from his earth. The man whom Princess Marie loved, whom she remembered, whom she smiled on in banishment, disgrace, and poverty, must wear an amulet too potent, he thought, to be done to death by a tribe of ingrate peasants. There could not be such devilish derision in fate, that at the very moment when his barren life blossomed like the rose, it was to be cut down by a yelling rabble against whom he had no sin but to have served them in sickness and to his own peril. He leaned against the marble pilaster, and let his thoughts drift away from the present hour to the past, which was so dear; to the future, which was still dearer. Come what may, be what might, nothing save death itself could slay that ecstasy which sang like a bird in his breast. The clock tolled at the stables more than once the passing hours, and the stillness was broken by no other sound. It was midnight; he thought the old woman had been misled by her fears: the men and women would no doubt return at sunrise from revel at some distant town to which they had known it would be useless to ask the Massaja to grant leave of absence. Suddenly he heard a sound, distant, slight, such a sound as the passing of goats or sheep over grass produces; scarcely perceptible by day, but audible in the deep hush of night.