Then, in the shadow below the sun-line cut by the mountains across the earth, she saw a sharp peak, grey and regular as a pyramid, rising in the midst of the high valley, and then beyond it, as the carriage rolled along, there was a misty landscape of a far, low valley—­and then, all at once, the brown, tiled roofs of her own Muro were at her feet, and far to the left, out of the houses, rose the round grey keep of the fortress.  The setting sun was behind the mountains, and the moon, near to the full, hung, round and white, just above the tower, in the pale eastern sky.  From the second turning of the steep descent, Veronica could see a huge bastion of the castle above the roofs, jutting out like an independent round fort.

Many of the people knew that she was coming, and some had hastened from their work to see her as soon as she arrived.  Curious, silent, pale, dirty, they thronged about the carriage.  An old woman touched Veronica’s skirt, and then brought her hand back to her lips and kissed it.  Then another did the same—­a thin, dark-browed girl with a ragged red shawl on her head.  The uncouth men stood shoulder to shoulder, staring with unwinking eyes.  A tall, pale shepherd youth was erect and motionless in a tattered hat and a brown cloak, overtopping the others by his head and thin throat, and there was something Sphinx-like in the expression of his still, sad face.

On Veronica’s right, as the carriage halted, was the public fountain.  Twenty or thirty tall, thin girls in short black frocks, displaying grimy stockings and coarse shoes, or bare legs and muddy red feet, were waiting their turns to fill the long wooden casks they carried on their heads.  The fountain had but two little streams of water, and it took a long time to fill a cask.  At the sound of the carriage wheels, most of the girls turned slowly round to see the sight, their empty barrels balanced cross-wise on their heads.  They did not even lift a hand to steady their burdens as they changed their positions.  They stared steadily.  Veronica looked to the right and left and tried to smile, to show that she was pleased.  But the visible, jagged edges of their outward misery cut cruelly at her heart, for they were her people; nominally, by old feudal right, they were all her people, and her father’s father had held right of justice and of life and death over them all; and in actual fact they were almost all her people, since they lived in her houses, worked on her lands, and ate a portion of her bread, though it was such a very little one as could barely keep them alive.

She tried to smile, and some of the girls held out their fingers towards her and then kissed them, as though they had touched her dress, as the old woman had done.  But the men stared stolidly from under the low brims of their battered hats.  Only the fever-struck shepherd smiled in a sickly way and lost his Sphinx-like look all at once.

A man in a white shirt came forward, leading Veronica’s mare, all saddled for her to mount.