The prospect of a supperless night under the trees, even though he had never been clogged with heavy feeding at the monastery, made Francesco's thoughts hark back to the inn he had left at Viterbo, and he regretted not having supplied himself with a stock of provisions ere he departed. Suddenly a distant sound made him pause and listen. The sound had a human note, and seemed nearer to him than he had at first imagined. He urged his steed on through the on-coming dusk. It was not long before the trees thinned before him and streams of golden light, slanting into an open space, gave the clearing the appearance of a forest-chapel at sunset. From the open ground ahead came the incessant babbling of a thin and querulous voice, that faltered between the prattling of a child and the chatter of a mad soul, talking to the empty air. Sometimes there was a croon in the voice, sometimes a touch of decrepit anger. A long, green bank, brushed by the boughs of the beech-trees, hid from Francesco the open ground that lay ahead of him. But, though it hid what he desired to see, the bank gave him the chance of approaching unobserved. Dismounting, he went up it on hands and knees, and insinuated a cautious head between the turf and the branches of the beeches. On the other side of the bank lay a stretch of undulating grass, that rose into mounds and ridges, and dipped into shallow dykes, the mounds and ridges catching the fading sunlight, the hollows lying filled with the shadows. The trunks of the forest-trees shut in this open space on every side as with a palisade. On a mound in the centre stood crags of ruined masonry smothered in ivy, a broken squint in the wall looking like a rent in a cloud, through which the sunlight slanted. A little old woman, with hair as white as snow, and strange black eyes in a strange and wrinkled face, knelt there, polishing something smooth and round that she held in her lap. The strange sight caused Francesco to peer all the more intently, and he drew back with a quick gasp, when in the suddenly revealed white dome of the head, the shadowy eye-sockets, the glistening teeth in the bare jaws, he recognized the thing for what it was,--the head of a skeleton.