e road, and with this humble provision slung in a handkerchief at his
side, set out once more. At first it was rather a relief to him to be
utterly alone; his own thoughts were his best companions, and he would
have shrunk from the questionings his appearance was certain to elicit;
but as the time wore on, and the noon of the second day was passed, he
felt the dreariness of the solitude creeping over him, and would gladly
have met with one with whom he could have interchanged even a few words
of greeting. Not a human trace, however, was now to be seen; for he had
gained that low-lying district which, stretching beneath the mountain of
Bolseno, extends, in patches of alternate lake and land, to the verge
of the Maremma. This tract is not even a sheep-walk, and although in
mid-winter the sportsman may venture in pursuit of the wild duck or the
mallard, the pestilential atmosphere produced by summer heat makes the
spot a desert. Gerald was not long a stranger to the sickly influences
of the place: a strange sense of dizziness would now and then come over
him--something less than sickness, but usually leaving him confused and
half stunned; great weariness, too, beset him; a desire to lie down and
sleep, so strong as almost to be irresistible, seized him, but a dread
of wild beasts--not unfrequent in these places--enabled him to conquer
this tendency. The sun bore down with all its noonday force upon him,
while an offensive odour from the stagnant waters oppressed him almost
to choking.

He walked on, however, on and on, but almost like one in a dream.
Thoughts of the past superseded all sensations of the present in his
mind, and he fancied he was back once more in the old college of the
Jesuit fathers. He heard the bell that summoned him to the schoolroom,
and he hastened to put himself in his place, marching with crossed arms
and bent-down head, in accustomed fashion. Then he heard his name called
aloud, and one of the fathers told him to stand aside, for he was 'up'
for punishment; and Fra Luke was there, wishing to speak to him, but not
admitted; and then--how, he knew not--but he was gazing on grizzly bears
and white-tusked boars, in great cages; and there they stood spell-bound
and savage, but unable to spring out, though it was but glass confined
them; and through all these scenes the wild strains of the tarantella
sounded, and the light gestures and wistful looks of Marietta, whose
hair, however, was no longer dark, b