“I am not saying you did ill,” growled Marc’antonio, slightly mollified.

“The Princess said so, however.  ‘You are a fool, O Stephanu,’ she told me; ’and as for needing you or Marc’antonio, on the contrary, I forbid you both to join the camp for a while.  Go back.  If you meet Marc’antonio upon the road, give him this message for me.’  ‘But where, O Princess,’ I asked, ‘are we to await your pleasure?’ ‘Fare north, if you will, to Cape Corso,’ she said, ’where that old mad Englishman boasts that he will reach my mother in her prison at Giraglia.  He has gone thither alone, refusing help; and you may perhaps be useful to him.’”

Marc’antonio’s growl grew deeper.  “Was that all?” he asked.

“That was all.”

“Then there is mischief here.  The Prince, O Stephanu, did not without purpose send you out of the way.  Now, whatever he purposed he must have meant to do quickly, before we two should return to the camp—­”

“He had mischief in his heart, I will swear,” assented Stephanu, after a glance at me and another at Marc’antonio, who reassured him with a nod.  “And that the Princess plainly guessed, by her manner at parting, when I set out with the man Priske.  She was sorry enough then to say good-bye to me,” he added, half boastfully.

“Nevertheless,” answered Marc’antonio with some sarcasm, “she appears to have neglected to confide to you what she feared.”

Stephanu spread out his hands.  “The Prince, and the reverend Father—­who can tell what passes in their minds?”

“Not you, at any rate!  Very well, then—­the Princess was apprehensive. . . .  Yet now, when the mischief (whatever it is) should either be done or on the point of doing, she will have none of our help.  Clearly she knows more, yet will have none of our help.  That is altogether puzzling to me. . . .  And she sends us north. . . .  Very well again; we will go north, but not far!”

He glanced back at me over his shoulder.  I read his meaning—­that he wished to plan his campaign privately with Stephanu—­and, reining in my pony, I fell back out of earshot.

The pass towards which we were climbing stood perhaps three thousand feet above the shore and the high road we had left; and the track, when it reached the steeper slopes, ran in long zigzagging terraces at the angles of which our ponies had sometimes to scramble up stairways cut in the living rock.  As the sun sank a light mist gradually spread over the coast below us, the distant islands grew dim, and we rode suspended, as it were, over a bottomless vale and a sea without horizon.  Slowly, out of these ghostly wastes, the moon lifted herself in full circle, and her rays, crossing the cope of heaven, lit up a tall grey crag on the ridge above us, and the stem of a white-withered bush hanging from it—­an isolated mass which (my companions told me) marked the summit of the ascent.

“The path leads round the base of it,” said Stephanu.  “We shall reach it in another twenty minutes.”