As the miles reeled away under him, his restlessness began to increase with the sweep of his horse's stride. Vague forms seemed to slip by him in the shadows; in every bush beside the road he saw white faces lurking. Strange, half-formed impressions of the new life he was about to enter upon, haunted him; strange forms in monkish garbs seemed to pass him in the gloom of the night and vanish silently as ghosts. Later he could not tell if he had seen them, or if they had been but the excrescences of his fevered brain. For always, when he had endeavored to rouse himself and look about him sanely, the road stretched before him white and desolate. The weight of the hours past, yet more the presage of those to come, had crushed Francesco's spirit with merciless relentlessness. He was yet too young to realize the healing power of time, how it bears forgetfulness on its kindly wings, how its shadow becomes finally a shield, by which the keen daggers of remembrance are blunted and turned aside. He did not know that the human soul can suffer only so far, that greater miseries efface the memory of the lesser. The irony of his parting from Ilaria, to him forever lost, her cruel words, had stabbed his soul to the quick, and to himself he appeared to have entered into a dismal, dreary land, a boundless valley of shadows. As he rode on, at a wild and reckless pace, the only human being on that wide expanse, all sense of pain and misery left the son of Gregorio Villani for the time, even all consciousness of the region which he traversed. He could not stop; it seemed an iron weight would crush him to earth, while, at the same time, a force against which he could not struggle drove him on. His brain seemed to be on fire; balls of flame danced before his eyes; while he looked upon them, they turned to faces grinning from out a blood-red mist. The faces drew closer and melted into one, Ilaria's face, as he had seen it last, white in its marble-cold disdain, with scarlet lips and flaming poppies in her dark scented hair.