“Let me come with you to-night,” she pleaded again.  “I will hide in the bushes.  The men shall not see me.”

“No, no,” he said sternly.  “Get you back to your rest at Ruscino.  I did wrong, I did basely to use your ignorance and abuse your obedience.  Get you gone, and listen to your priest, not to me.”

The child, ever obedient, vanished through the olive boughs.  Adone went onward northward to his tryst:  his soul was dark as night; it enraged him to have been forced by his conscience and his honour to obey the command of Don Silverio.

But she did not go over the bridge to Ruscino.  She waited a little while then followed on his track.  Gianna was right.  She was a wild bird.  She had been caught and tamed for a time, but she was always wild.  The life which they had given her had been precious and sweet to her, and she had learned willingly all its ways; but at the bottom of her heart the love of liberty, the live of movement, the love of air and sky and freedom were stronger than all else.  She was of an adventurous temper also, and brave like all Abruzzese, and she longed to see one of those moonlit midnight meetings of armed men to which she had escaped from Alaida’s keeping, she could not have forced herself to go back out of this clear, cool, radiant night into the little, close, dark sleeping-chamber.  No, not if Don Silverio himself had stood in her path with the cross raised.  She was like a year-old lioness who smells blood.

She knew the way to the tomb of Asdrubal, even in the darkness, as well as he did.  It was situated in a grassy hollow surrounded by dense trees, some five miles or more from the Terra Vergine, on the north bank of the river.  The solitude was absolute, and the place large enough to permit the assemblage of several scores of men.

Adone went on, unconscious that he was followed; he went at a swinging trot, easy and swift; the sinews of his lithe limbs were strong as steel, and his rage, all aflame, lent lightning to his feet.

She allowed him to precede her by half a mile or more, for if he had seen her his anger would have been great, and she feared it.  She went skipping and bounding along, where the path was clear, in all the joy of liberty and rapture of the fresh night air.  The hours spent in Alaida’s close house in the village had been as terrible to her as his hours in a birdcatcher’s hamper are to a wild bird.  Up at Ansalda she had always been out of doors, and at the Terra Vergine she had gone under a roof only to eat and sleep.

The moon, which was in the beginning of its first quarter, had passed behind some heavy clouds; there was little light, for there were as yet few stars visible, but that was not matter to her.  She knew her way as well as any mountain hare.