The blood poured back to her face.  “Me!  My enemies!” she stammered.  “It is not of them I think.”  She raised her head and faced him in a glow.

For a moment he stood stupidly gazing at her; then the mist lifted and through it he saw a great light.

***

The landlord’s knock warned them that their horses waited, and they rode out in the grey morning.  The world about them still lay in shade, and as they climbed the wooded defile above the valley Odo was reminded of the days at Donnaz when he had ridden up the mountain in the same early light.  Never since then had he felt, as he did now, the boy’s easy kinship with the unexpected, the sense that no encounter could be too wonderful to fit in with the mere wonder of living.

To avoid the road to Peschiera they had resolved to cross the Monte Baldo by a mule-track which should bring them out at one of the villages on the eastern shore of Garda; and the search for this path led them up through steep rain-scented woods where they had to part the wet boughs as they passed.  From time to time they regained the highway and rode abreast, almost silent at first with the weight of their new nearness, and then breaking into talk that was the mere overflow of what they were thinking.  There was in truth more to be felt between them than to be said; since, as each was aware, the new light that suffused the present left the future as obscure as before.  But what mattered, when the hour was theirs?  The narrow kingdom of today is better worth ruling over than the widest past or future; but not more than once does a man hold its fugitive sceptre.  The past, however, was theirs also:  a past so transformed that he must revisit it with her, joyously confronting her new self with the image of her that met them at each turn.  Then he had himself to trace in her memories, his transfigured likeness to linger over in the Narcissus-mirror of her faith in him.  This interchange of recollections served them as well as any outspoken expression of feeling, and the most commonplace allusion was charged with happy meanings.

Arabia Petraea had been an Eden to such travellers; how much more the happy slopes they were now descending!  All the afternoon their path wound down the western incline of Monte Baldo, first under huge olives, then through thickets of laurel and acacia, to emerge on a lower level of lemon and orange groves, with the blue lake showing through a diaper of golden-fruited boughs.  Fulvia, to whom this clear-cut southern foliage was as new as the pure intensity of light that bathed it, seemed to herself to be moving through the landscape of a dream.  It was as though nature had been remodelled, transformed almost, under the touch of their love:  as though they had found their way to the Hesperian glades in which poets and painters placed the legendary lovers of antiquity.