About mid-day they quitted the shelter of forest trees and stood on broken ground, without a path to guide them.  Vittoria did her best to laugh at her mishaps in walking, and compared herself to a Capuchin pilgrim; but she was unused to going bareheaded and shoeless, and though she held on bravely, the strong beams of the sun and the stony ways warped her strength.  She had to check fancies drawn from Arabian tales, concerning the help sometimes given by genii of the air and enchanted birds, that were so incessant and vivid that she found herself sulking at the loneliness and helplessness of the visible sky, and feared that her brain was losing its hold of things.  Angelo led her to a half-shaded hollow, where they finished the remainder of yesterday’s meat and wine.  She set her eyes upon a gold-green lizard by a stone and slept.

‘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.’