Was it a talisman against death, this call of his earliest years, which usurped with signs of strength the temptation to make an end of things, the desire for annihilation? His youth helped him, and he recovered gradually some energy, lifting his feet one after the other as if he pulled them out of clinging soil that held them fast. He dragged himself, rather than walked, for a few yards further. He was afraid now, and hardened himself against the danger that he felt present at his side, coming with him step by step in the solitude, like an enemy watching for him to falter. He knew that there were board shelters at intervals through the pass to protect travellers from tempests or the cold. To find one of these was the limit of his ambition. And then suddenly he perceived at the base of Monte Leone a feeble ray that hardly glowed in the too clear night. Quite small and crowded against the enormous mass of the mountain, it was the hospice at last, its door always wide open; there was even a lamp to designate it. The moment he saw the light he was saved. He never took his eyes from its encouraging beacon. Soon the building took on its real proportions, high and large, built of great blocks of freestone. At last he climbed the steps and went in. Some dogs, from the bottom of a distant kennel, sounded his arrival, but in the hall, where the moonlight filtered in, he came across no one. Would they leave him in distress at their very door? He would have lain down there on the stones in his weariness had not the instructions of the man from Piedmont recurred to his memory: “At night you go in and find a room on the first floor without saying anything to anybody.” He climbed the staircase, tried a first door, which was closed, then a second, which opened to him. He found himself in a plain but comfortable chamber, furnished with a bed with clean sheets and a generous supply of blankets, a dressing-table, a commode, two or three chairs and a carpet. At the sight of this outfit he smiled with pleasure. They had even carried foresight as far as to place on the commode, in such a way as to attract the traveller’s attention, a flask of rum, a glass and a bowl of sugar. The liquor warmed his blood. At twenty-five danger is easily forgotten. “I’m quite at home here, like a burglar,” he said pleasantly, quite disposed to take life at its new value. But the reflection made him start. Like a thief, indeed. Had he not been convicted of theft? The recollection of this shame spoiled his pleasure, and he got into bed hastily. The thick blankets communicated a comforting warmth to him, and his fatigue was so great that he went to sleep at once, without stopping to think that it was the first night he had passed away from Edith, and outside of Italy, since he had left his father’s house.