for on his right, as he looked, there rose the dark tower of Nona, and from the highest turret he could clearly see in the moonlight how the long rain-bleached rope hung down and swayed in the breeze, and the noose at the end of it softly knocked upon the tower wall; more than once, also, when he had looked out in the morning, he had seen a corpse hanging there by the neck, stiff and staring and wet with dew. But when the spring day dawned and the birds sang at his window, and when, looking out, he felt the breath of the sweet south and saw that Rome smiled again, then his resolutions failed, and instead of bidding Dunstan pack his armour and his fine clothes for a journey, he made his men mount and ride with him to the far regions of the city. Often he loitered away the afternoon in the desolate regions of the Aventine, riding slowly from one lonely church to another, and sometimes spending an hour in conversation with a solitary priest who, by living much alone and among inscriptions and old carvings, had gathered a little more learning than was common among the unlettered Romans. He met with no adventures; for though the highways in the country swarmed with robbers always on the watch for a merchant's train or for a rich traveller, yet within the city's limits, small as was the authority of the Senate and of the Prefect, thieves dared not band together in numbers, and no two or three of them would have cared to come to blows with Gilbert and his men. Nor did he make friends in Rome. His first intention had been to present himself to the principal baron in the city, as a traveller of good birth, and to request the advantages of friendship and protection; and so he would have done in any other European city. But he had soon learned that Rome was far behind the rest of the world in the social practices of chivalry, and that in placing himself under a Roman baron's protection he would, to all intents and purposes, be taking service instead of accepting hospitality. Even so, he might have been willing to take such a position for the sake of adventure; yet he could by no means make up his mind to a choice between the half-Jewish Pierleoni and the rough-mannered Frangipani. To the red-handed Crescenzi he would not go; the Colonna of that time were established on the heights of Tusculum, and the Orsini, friends to the Pope, had withdrawn to distant Galera, in the fever-haunted marsh northwest of Rome.