When Nino went out he found his countryman, and explained to him what he was to do.  The man saddled one of the mules and put himself on the watch, while Nino sat by the fire in the quaint old inn and ate some bread.  It was the end of March when these things happened, and a little fire was grateful, though one could do very well without it.  He spread his hands to the flame of the sticks, as he sat on the wooden settle by the old hearth, and he slowly gnawed his corn cake, as though a week before he had not been a great man in Paris, dining sumptuously with famous people.  He was not thinking of that.  He was looking in the flame for a fair face that he saw continually before him, day and night.  He expected to wait a long time,—­some hours, perhaps.

Twenty minutes had not elapsed, however, before his man came breathless through the door, calling to him to come at once; for the solitary rider had gone out, as was expected, and at a pace that would soon take him out of sight.  Nino threw his corn bread to a hungry dog that yelped as it hit him, and then fastened on it like a beast of prey.

In the twinkling of an eye he and his man were out of the inn.  As they ran to the place where the mule was tied to an old ring in the crumbling wall of a half-ruined house near to the ascent to the castle, the man told Nino that the fine gentleman had ridden toward Trevi, down the valley, Nino mounted, and hastened in the same direction.

As he rode he reflected that it would be wiser to meet the count on his return, and pass him after the interview, as though going away from Fillettino.  It would be a little harder for the mule; but such an animal, used to bearing enormous burdens for twelve hours at a stretch, could well carry Nino only a few miles of good road before sunset, and yet be fresh again by midnight.  One of those great sleek mules, if good-tempered, will tire three horses, and never feel the worse for it.  He therefore let the beast go her own pace along the road to Trevi, winding by the brink of the rushing torrent:  sometimes beneath great overhanging cliffs, sometimes through bits of cultivated land, where the valley widens; and now and then passing under some beech-trees, still naked and skeleton-like in the bright March air.

But Nino rode many miles, as he thought, without meeting the count, dangling his feet out of the stirrups, and humming snatches of song to himself to pass the time.  He looked at his watch,—­a beautiful gold one, given him by a very great personage in Paris,—­and it was half-past two o’clock.  Then, to avoid tiring his mule, he got off and sat by a tree, at a place where he could see far along the road.  But three o’clock came, and a quarter past, and he began to fear that the count had gone all the way to Trevi.  Indeed, Trevi could not be very far off, he thought.  So he mounted again, and paced down the valley.  He says that in all that time he never thought once of what he should say to the count when he met him, having determined in his mind once and for all what was to be asked; to which the only answer must be “yes” or “no.”