The farm-wife came out with a full bowl of milk.  Her hands shook and spilled some as she handed it to me, so eager were they to hold her infant again.  Taking it and feeling the damp sweat as she passed a hand over its brow, she broke forth into blessings.

We told her of her mistake:  but I doubt if she heard.

“I have dwelt here these three years,” she persisted, “and none ever walked the mountain by the path you have come.”  She watched us as I held the bowl for the Princess to drink, and asked quaintly, “But is there truly no marrying in heaven?  I have thought upon that many times, and always it puzzles me.”

We said farewell to her, and took her blessings with us as she watched us across the head of the ravine.  Then followed another half-hour of silence and sharp climbing:  but the worst was over, and by-and-by the range tailed off into a chain of lessening hills over which in the purple distance rose a solitary sharp cone with a ruinous castle upon it, which (said the Princess) was Seneca’s Tower at the head of the Vale of Luri.

We were now beyond the danger of the Genoese, and therefore turned aside to the left and descended the slopes to the high-road, along which we made good speed until, having passed the tower and the mouth of the gorge which leads up to it from the westward, we came, almost at nightfall, within sight of Pino by the sea.

Here I proposed that I should go forward to the village and find a night’s lodging for her, pointing out that, the night being warm and dry, I could make my couch comfortably enough in one of the citron orchards that here lined the road on the landward side.  To this at first she assented—­it seemed to me, even eagerly.  But I had scarcely taken forty paces up the road before I heard her voice calling me back, and back I went obediently.

“O husband,” she said, “the dusk has fallen, and now in the dusk I can say a word I have been longing all day to be free of.  Nay”—­she put out a hand—­“you must not forbid me.  You must not even delay me now.”

“What is it, that I should forbid you?”

“It is—­about Brussels.”

I dropped my hand impatiently and was turning away, but she touched my arm and the touch pleaded with me to face her.

“I have a right. . . .  Yes, it was good of you to refuse it; but you cannot go on refusing, because—­see you—­your goodness makes my right the stronger.  This morning I could have told you, but you refused me.  All this day I have known that refusal unjust.”

“All this day?  Then—­pardon, Princess—­but why should I hear you now, at this moment?”

“The daylight is past,” she said.  “You can listen now and not see my face.”

On the hedge of the ditch beside the high-road lay a rough fragment of granite, a stone cracked and discarded, once the base of an olive-mill.  She found a seat upon it and motioned to me to come close, and I stood close, staring down on her while she stared down at her feet, grey with dust almost as the road itself.