Toward sunset they rested in an olive-orchard, tethering their horses to the low boughs.  Overhead, through the thin foliage of tarnished silver, the sky, as the moon suffused it, melted from steel blue to a clearer silver.  A peasant-woman whose hut stood close by brought them a goat’s cheese on a vine-leaf and a jug of spring-water; and as they supped, a little goat-herd, driving his flock down the hill, paused to watch them with furtive woodland eyes.

Odo, questioning him, learned that at the village on the shore below they could obtain a boat to carry them across the lake.  Fulvia, for lack of a passport, dared not set foot on Austrian soil; but the Swiss authorities were less exacting and Odo had hopes of crossing the border without difficulty.  They set out again presently, descending through the grey dusk of the olives till the path became too steep for riding; then Odo lifted Fulvia from the saddle and led the two horses after her.  Here and there, between the trees, they caught a momentary glimpse of lights on the shore and the pale gleam of the lake enclosed in black foliage.  From the village below came snatches of song and the shrill wail of a pipe; and as the night deepened they saw, far out on the water, the wild flare of the fish-spearers’ torches, like comets in an inverted sky.

With nightfall the spirits of both had sunk.  Fulvia walked ahead in silence and Odo read a mute apprehension in her drooping outline.  Every step brought them nearer to the point they both feared to face, and though each knew what lay in the other’s thoughts neither dared break the silence.  Odo’s mind turned anxiously to the incidents of the morning, to the finding of the ducal coat-of-arms, and to all the possibilities it suggested.  What errand save one could have carried an envoy from Pianura to that remote hamlet among the hills?  He could scarcely doubt that it was in pursuit of himself that the ducal messenger travelled; but with what object was the journey undertaken?  Was he to be recalled in obedience to some new whim of the Duke’s?  Or had some unforeseen change—­he dared not let his thoughts define it—­suddenly made his presence needful in Pianura?  It was more probable that the possibility of his flight with Fulvia had been suggested to the Duke by the ecclesiastical authorities, and that the same hand which had parted them before was again secretly at work.  In any case, it was Odo’s first business to see his companion safely across the border; and in that endeavour he had now little fear of being thwarted.  If the Duke’s messenger awaited them at Peschiera he waited in vain; and though their flight across the lake might be known before dawn it would then be no easy matter to overtake them.