It was now verging towards evening. Francesco had reached the top of a lower ridge, from which the towers of Camaldoli, seen through a gap in the trees, rose shadowy against the fading blue of the horizon. The path, hardly more than a foottrail, had been lonely. Now a priest came ambling up on mule-back, feasting his eyes on the pleasant woodland. At the sight of Francesco he dropped them on his breviary, and passed on without word or sign. For a moment the action struck him as a smart. The sight of the Office-book had opened the door of another chamber in the house of Mind, that mysterious dwelling which always numbers rooms which the owner has never entered, and others, closed in long disuse. At that moment the faint spark of devotion passed into a large indifference. In his early youth Francesco had been in the habit--how acquired he could not have told--of repeating, whenever possible, the canonical hours. He had long abandoned the custom, as far as intention went; yet in some forgotten chapel of the mind, deserted of the conscious powers, the holy rites go on forever, biding the time of their recall. He was as one in the grip of a bitter wrong; for through the jostling images which filled his mind, the Office continued to ring in persistent undertones. The light between the great tree trunks grew from splendor to splendor; flashing its level glories through the forest, transfiguring the wood into flame. The sun had reached the rim of the horizon. Some far memory of brilliance was stirring and seeking. A pageant, withal, but not that triumph of earthly love, so fair in the false twilight of a night in the past, so wizened gray and lustful red in the light of recollection. The beams of the sinking sun were seven candle-sticks of gold. What noble elders follow, crowned with fleurs-de-lis? What mystic chariot was this, within which rides a woman olive-garlanded, robed in hues of living fire and of the fresh spring grass? Memory found what it sought: but he who thus looked back into the past was unaware that neither Lethé nor Eunoë might be his, who had not yet climbed the Purgatorial Mound. The sun was sinking in the west when Francesco came to a ridge in the woodland, which sloped southward from the high rocks. The path seemed to lead into the heart of a wilderness. Pine woods bordered it and dead bracken and whortleberry spread away under the stiff shadows of the silent trees. A thousand spires began to blacken against the sunset, and Francesco was aware that he was carrying a savage hunger. He had hoped for a manor-house or inn, or some woodman's lodge, but the brambles that had rooted their long feelers across the path made it appear that the track had not been used for years. So rough and tangled did it become that Francesco turned in among the trees, where the dense summer foliage of the beeches had kept the ground clear of brush and bramble.