I started up wide awake at the sound of a footstep beside me, and sat erect, blinking against the rays of a lantern held close to my eyes.  The Princess held it, and at Nat’s head and feet stood Marc’antonio and Stephanu, in the act of lifting his litter.  She motioned that I should stand up and follow.  Marc’antonio and Stephanu fell into file behind us.  Each carried a gun in a sling.

“I will hold the light where the path is difficult,” she said quietly; “but keep a watch upon your feet.  In an hour’s time we shall have plenty of light.”

I looked and saw the sickle of the waning moon suspended over the gulf.  It shot but the feeblest glimmer along the edges of the granite pinnacles, none upon the black masses of the pine-tops.  But around it the darkness held a faint violet glow, and I knew that day must be climbing close on its heels.

There was no promise of day, however, along the track into which we plunged—­the track by which my comrades had descended to cross the valley.  It dived down the mountain-side through a tunnel of pines, and in places the winter streams, now dry, had channelled it and broken it up with land-slides.

“You do not ask where I am leading you,” she said, holding her lantern for me at one of these awkward places.

“I am your hostage, Princess,” I answered, without looking at her, my eyes being busy just then in discovering good foothold.  “You must do with me what you will.”

“If I could!  Ah, if I could!”

She said it hard and low, with clenched teeth, almost hissing the words.  I stared at her, amazed.  No sign of anger had she shown until this moment.  What cause indeed had she to be angered?  In what way had my words offended?  Yet angry she was, trembling with such a gust of wrath that the lantern shook in her hand.

Before I could master my surprise, she had mastered herself:  and, turning, resumed her way.  For the next twenty minutes we descended in silence, while the dawn, breaking above the roofed pines, filtered down to us and filled the spaces between their trunks with a brownish haze.  By-and-by, when the slope grew easier and flattened itself out to form the bottom of the basin, these pines gave place to a chestnut wood, and the carpet of slippery needles to a tangled undergrowth taller than a very tall man:  and here, in a clearing beside the track, we came on a small hut with a ruinous palisade beside it, fencing off a pen or courtyard of good size—­some forty feet square, maybe.

The Princess halted, and I halted a few paces from her, studying the hut.  It was built of pine-logs sawn lengthwise in half and set together with their untrimmed bark turned outwards:  but the most of their bark had peeled away with age.  It had two square holes for windows, and a doorway, but no door.  Its shingle roof had buckled this way and that with the rains, and had taken on a tinge of grey which the dawn touched to softest silver.  Lines of more brilliant silver criss-crossed it, and these were the tracks of snails.