zed with
excitement and wonder. She felt vaguely that Ciccio was miserable,
and wondered why.

She woke with a start an hour or so later. The moon was in the room.
She did not know where she was. And she was frightened. And she was
cold. A real terror took hold of her. Ciccio in his bed was quite
still. Everything seemed electric with horror. She felt she would
die instantly, everything was so terrible around her. She could not
move. She felt that everything around her was horrific,
extinguishing her, putting her out. Her very being was threatened.
In another instant she would be transfixed.

Making a violent effort she sat up. The silence of Ciccio in his bed
was as horrible as the rest of the night. She had a horror of him
also. What would she do, where should she flee? She was
lost--lost--lost utterly.

The knowledge sank into her like ice. Then deliberately she got out
of bed and went across to him. He was horrible and frightening, but
he was warm. She felt his power and his warmth invade her and
extinguish her. The mad and desperate passion that was in him sent
her completely unconscious again, completely unconscious.

CHAPTER XV

THE PLACE CALLED CALIFANO

There is no mistake about it, Alvina was a lost girl. She was cut
off from everything she belonged to. Ovid isolated in Thrace might
well lament. The soul itself needs its own mysterious nourishment.
This nourishment lacking, nothing is well.

At Pescocalascio it was the mysterious influence of the mountains
and valleys themselves which seemed always to be annihilating the
Englishwoman: nay, not only her, but the very natives themselves.
Ciccio and Pancrazio clung to her, essentially, as if she saved them
also from extinction. It needed all her courage. Truly, she had to
support the souls of the two men.

At first she did not realize. She was only stunned with the
strangeness of it all: startled, half-enraptured with the terrific
beauty of the place, half-horrified by its savage annihilation of
her. But she was stunned. The days went by.

It seems there are places which resist us, which have the power to
overthrow our psychic being. It seems as if every country has its
potent negative centres, localities which savagely and triumphantly
refuse our living culture. And Alvina had struck one of them, here
on the edge of the Abruzzi.

She was not in the village of Pescocalascio itself. That was a long
hour's walk away. Pancrazio's house was the