st train can stay there all night!"

Protests were useless. The _facchino_ was gone, and we waited anxiously
for his return. It seemed as though he would never come. Darkness had
fallen, and the moon was rising over the mountains. At last he appeared.

"The Signori may stay all night, and welcome; but they cannot come to
dinner, for there is nothing in the house to eat!"

This was not reassuring, and again the old station-master lost himself
in meditation. The results were admirable, for in a little time the
table in the waiting-room had been transformed into a dining-table, and
Tom and I were ravenously devouring a big omelette, and bread and
cheese, and drinking a most shocking sour wine as though it were Chateau
Yquem. A _facchino_ served us, with clumsy good-will; and when we had
induced our nervous old host to sit down with us and partake of his own
hospitality, we succeeded in forming a passably jolly dinner-party,
forgetting over our sour wine and cigarettes the coming hours from ten
until sunrise, which lay before us in a dubious mist.

It was with crowding apprehensions which we strove in vain to joke away
that we set out at last to retrace our steps to the mysterious villa,
the _facchino_ Giuseppe leading the way. By this time the moon was well
overhead, and just behind us as we tramped up the dewy lane, white in
the moonlight between the ink-black hedgerows on either side. How still
it was! Not a breath of air, not a sound of life; only the awful silence
that had lain almost unbroken for two thousand years over this vast
graveyard of a dead world.

As we passed between the shattered gates and wound our way in the
moonlight through the maze of gnarled fruit-trees, decaying farm
implements and piles of lumber, towards the small door that formed the
only opening in the first story of this deserted fortress, the cold
silence was shattered by the harsh baying of dogs somewhere in the
distance to the right, beyond the barns that formed one side of the
court. From the villa came neither light nor sound. Giuseppe knocked at
the weather-worn door, and the sound echoed cavernously within; but
there was no other reply. He knocked again and again, and at length we
heard the rasping jar of sliding bolts, and the door opened a little,
showing an old, old man, bent with age and gaunt with malaria. Over his
head he held a big Roman lamp, with three wicks, that cast strange
shadows on his face,--a face that was harmless i