‘The quantity of sleep I require is unmeasured,’ she said, a minute afterwards, according to her reckoning of time, and expected to see the lizard still by the stone.  Angelo was near her; the sky was full of colours, and the earth of shadows.

‘Another day gone!’ she exclaimed in wonderment, thinking that the days of human creatures had grown to be as rapid and (save toward the one end) as meaningless as the gaspings of a fish on dry land.  He told her that he had explored the country as far as he had dared to stray from her.  He had seen no habitation along the heights.  The vale was too distant for strangers to reach it before nightfall.  ‘We can make a little way on,’ said Vittoria, and the trouble of walking began again.  He entreated her more than once to have no fear.  ‘What can I fear?’ she asked.  His voice sank penitently:  ’You can rely on me fully when there is anything to do for you.’

‘I am sure of that,’ she replied, knowing his allusion to be to his frenzy of yesterday.  In truth, no woman could have had a gentler companion.

On the topmost ridge of the heights, looking over an interminable gulf of darkness they saw the lights of the vale.  ’A bird might find his perch there, but I think there is no chance for us,’ said Vittoria.  ’The moment we move forward to them the lights will fly back.  It is their way of behaving.’

Angelo glanced round desperately.  Farther on along the ridge his eye caught sight of a low smouldering fire.  When he reached it he had a great disappointment.  A fire in the darkness gives hopes that men will be at hand.  Here there was not any human society.  The fire crouched on its ashes.  It was on a little circular eminence of mossed rock; black sticks, and brushwood, and dry fern, and split logs, pitchy to the touch, lay about; in the centre of them the fire coiled sullenly among its ashes, with a long eye like a serpent’s.

‘Could you sleep here?’ said Angelo.

‘Anywhere!’ Vittoria sighed with droll dolefulness.

‘I can promise to keep you warm, signorina.’

‘I will not ask for more till to-morrow, my friend.’

She laid herself down sideways, curling up her feet, with her cheek on the palm of her hand.

Angelo knelt and coaxed the fire, whose appetite, like that which is said to be ours, was fed by eating, for after the red jaws had taken half-a-dozen sticks, it sang out for more, and sent up flame leaping after flame and thick smoke.  Vittoria watched the scene through a thin division of her eyelids; the fire, the black abyss of country, the stars, and the sentinel figure.  She dozed on the edge of sleep, unable to yield herself to it wholly.  She believed that she was dreaming when by-and-by many voices filled her ears.  The fire was sounding like an angry sea, and the voices were like the shore, more intelligible, but confused in shriller clamour.  She was awakened by Angelo, who knelt on one knee and took her outlying