As soon as she heard by the heavy breathing of the aged woman that she was sunk in the congested slumber of old age, the child got up noiselessly —­ she had not undressed —­ and stole out of the chamber, taking the door key from the nail on which Alaida had hung it.  A short stone stair led down to the entrance.  No one else was sleeping in the house; all was dark, and she had not even a match or a tinder-box; but she felt her way to the outer door, unlocked it, as she had been used to unlock the door at the Terra Vergine, and in another moment ran down the steep and stone street.  She laughed as the wind from the river blew against her lips, and brought her the fragrance of Adone’s fields.

“I shall be in time!” she thought, as she ran down a short cut which led, in a breakneck descent, over the slope of what had once been the glacis of the fortress, beneath the Rocca to the bridge.

The usual spot for the assembly of the malcontents was a grassy hollow surrounded on all sides with woods, and called the tomb of Asdrubal, from a mound of masonry which bore that name, although it was utterly improbable that Asdrubal, who had been slain a hundred miles to the northeast on the Marecchia water, should have been buried in the Valdedera at all.  But the place and the name were well known in the district to hundreds of peasants, who knew no more who or what Asdrubal had been than they knew the names of the stars which form the constellation of Perseus.

Adone had summoned his friends to be there by nightfall, and he was passing from the confines of his own lands on to those of the open moors when the child saw him.  He was dressed in his working clothes, but he was fully armed:  his gun on his shoulder, his great pistols in his sash, his dagger in his stocking.  They were ancient arms; but they had served in matters of life and death, and would so serve again.  On the three-edged blade of the sixteenth-century poignard was a blood-stain more than a century old which nothing would efface.

“Nerina!” he cried as the girl stopped him, and was more distressed than pleased to see her there; he had not thought of her.

In the moonlight, under the silvery olive foliage her little sunburnt face and figure took a softer and more feminine grace.  But Adone had not sight for it.  For him she was but a sturdy little pony, who would trot till she dropped.

He was cruel as those who are possessed by one intense and absorbing purpose always are:  he was cruel to Nerina as Garibaldi, in the days of Ravenna, was cruel to Anita.

But through that intense egotism which sees in all the world only its own cause, its own end, its own misery, there touched him for one instant an unselfish pity for the child of whom he had made so mercilessly his servant and his slave.

“Poor little girl!  I have been hard to you, I have been cruel and unfair,” he said, as a vague sense of her infinite devotion to his cause moved him as a man may be moved by a dog’s fidelity.