“Ma dove? dove? . . .”

The Princess pointed, and far on the road, miles beyond the waggon, I saw that which no man, sick or hale, sees for the first time in his life without a lift of the heart—­the long glittering rampart of the Alps.

“Do we cross them?”

“Pianu. . . .  In time, O beloved; thou and I . . . all in good time.”

I gazed up at her, half-frightened by the tenderness in her voice; and what I saw frightened me wholly.  The sullenness had gone from her eyes; as a mother upon the child in her lap, so she looked down upon me; but her face was wan, even in the warm sunlight, and pinched, and hollow-eyed.  I lifted her hand—­a little way only, my own being so weak.  It was frail, transparent, as though wasted by very hunger.

She read the question I could not ask, and answered it with a brave laugh. (It appeared, then, that she had taught herself to laugh.)

“We have been sick, thou and I. The mountains will cure us.”

I looked along the road towards them, then up at her again.  I remembered afterwards that though she spoke so cheerfully of the mountains, her gaze had turned from them, to travel back across the plain.

“A little while!” she went on.  “We must wait a little while to recover our strength.  But there are friends yonder, to help us.”

“Friends?” I echoed, wondering that I possessed any.

“You must leave all talk to me,” she commanded; “and, if you are rested, we ought not to sit idling here.”  She helped the driver to lift me back into the waggon, where, as it moved on, she seated herself in the straw and took my hand.  All her shyness had gone, with all her sullenness.

“There is a farm,” began she, “a bare twelve leagues from here, says the waggoner, who knows it.  I carry a letter to the farmer from his brother, who is the parish priest of Trecate, and a good man.  He says that his brother, too, is a good man, and will show us kindness for his sake, because the farm once belonged to my friend, as the elder, until he gave it up to follow God.  The pair have not met since twenty years; for Trecate lies not far from Milan, and the farm is deep in the mountains, above a village called Domodossola, where the folk are no travellers. . . .”

Here her voice faded into a dream again; for a very little waking wearied me, then and for weeks to come, and the word Milano brought back the church, the stained window, the priest’s voice talking, and confused all these with the rumbling of the waggon.  But I held my love’s hand, and that was enough.

We came that same evening to the shore of a lake, beautiful as a pool dropped out of Paradise, and the next day crawled uphill, hour after hour, over a jolting road to the village, where I lay while the driver climbed to the farm with the Princess’s letter.  He was gone five hours, but returned with the farmer, and the farmer’s tall eldest son; and the pair had brought a litter, in which to carry me home.