t angels fear to take
Untenderly . . . Sirs,
Only seventeen!"

Then he begins his story of

". . . Our flight from dusk to clear,
Through day and night and day again to night
Once more, and to last dreadful dawn of all."

Thinking how they sat in silence, both so fearless and so safe, waking
but now and then to consciousness of the wonder of it, he cries:

"You know this is not love, Sirs--it is faith,
The feeling that there's God."

By morning they had passed Perugia; Assisi was opposite. He met her look
for the first time since they had started. . . . At Foligno he urged her
to take a brief rest, but with eyes like a fawn's,

"Tired to death in the thicket, when she feels
The probing spear o' the huntsman,"

she had cried, "On, on to Rome, on, on"--and they went on. During the
night she had a troubled dream, waving away something with wild arms;
and Caponsacchi prayed (thinking "Why, in my life I never prayed
before!") that the dream might go, and soon she slept peacefully. . . .
When she woke, he answered her first look with the assurance that Rome
was within twelve hours; no more of the terrible journey. But she
answered that she wished it could last for ever: to be "with no dread"--

"Never to see a face nor hear a voice--
Yours is no voice; you speak when you are dumb;
Nor face, I see it in the dark" . . .

--such tranquillity was such heaven to her!

"This one heart" (she said on her death-bed):

"This one heart gave me all the spring!
I could believe himself by his strong will
Had woven around me what I thought the world
We went along in . . .
For, through the journey, was it natural
Such comfort should arise from first to last?"

As she looks back, new stars bud even while she seeks for old, and all
is Caponsacchi:

"Him I now see make the shine everywhere."

Best of all her memories--"oh, the heart in that!"--was the descent at a
little wayside inn. He tells of it thus. When the day was broad, he
begged her to descend at the post-house of a village. He told the woman
of the house that Pompilia was his sister, married and unhappy--would
she comfort her as women can? And then he left them together:

"I spent a good half-hour, paced to and fro
The garden; just to leave her free awhile . . .
I might have sat beside her on the bench
Where the children were: I wish the thing