From Turin they had to start again early in the morning.  They had by this time grown quite accustomed to the plod, plodding of the train; it seemed almost one of the normal and necessary conditions of life.  They went down by Genoa, Spezia, Pisa, Sienna, and Rome, making the shortest possible pauses.

One night the windows of a sitting-room in a hotel at the western end of Naples were opened, and a young girl stepped out on to the high balcony, a light shawl thrown over her head and shoulders.  It was a beautiful night; the air sweet and still; the moonlight shining over the scarcely stirring waters of the bay.  Before her rose the vast bulk of the Castello dell’ Ovo, a huge mass of black shadow against the silvery sea and the lambent sky:  then far away throbbed the dull orange lights of the city; and beyond these, again, Vesuvius towered into the clear darkness, with a line of sharp, intense crimson marking its summit.  Through the perfect silence she could hear the sound of the oars of a boat, itself unseen; and over the whispering waters came some faint and distant refrain, “Addio! addio!” At length even these sounds ceased, and she was alone in the still, murmuring beautiful night.

She looked across to the great city.  Who were her unknown friends there?  What mighty power was she about to invoke on the morrow?  There was no need for her to consult the card that Calabressa had given her; again and again, in the night-time, when her mother lay asleep, she had studied it, and wondered whether it would prove the talisman the giver had called it.  She looked at this great city beside the sea, and only knew that it was beautiful in the moonlight; she had no fear of anything that it contained.  And then she thought of another city, far away in the colder north, and she wondered if a certain window were open there, overlooking the river and the gas-lamp and the bridges, and whether there was one there thinking of her.  Could not the night-wind carry the speech and desire of her heart?—­“Good-night, good-night....  Love knows no fear....  Not yet is our life forever broken for us.”

CHAPTER XLVI.

THE BEECHES.

On the same night Lord Evelyn was in Brand’s rooms, arguing, expostulating, entreating, all to no purpose.  He was astounded at the calmness with which this man appeared to accept the terrible task imposed on him, and at the stoical indifference with which he looked forward to the almost certain sacrifice of his own life.

“You have become a fanatic of fanatics!” he exclaimed, indignantly.

George Brand was staring out of the windows into the dark night, somewhat absently.