undergrowth and darkness, I crept back to my couch and slept.

That day, though the sun was rising before I awoke again and broke
fast, I caught up with it before noon: that is to say, with the work
I had promised myself to accomplish. Before sunset I had scraped
over and cleaned the entire area of the sty. Also I had fetched fern
in handfuls and strewn the floor of the hut, which was now dry and
clean to the smell.

In the evening I blew my horn for the hogs, and they returned to
their pen obediently as the Princess had promised. I had scarcely
finished numbering them when Marc'antonio came down the track, this
time haling a recalcitrant she-goat by a halter.

He tethered the goat and instructed me how to milk her.

The next evening he brought, at my request, a saw. I had cleaned out
the sty thoroughly, and turned-to at once to enlarge the
window-openings to admit more light and air into the hut.

Still, as I worked, my spirits rose. Nat was bettering fast.
In a few more days, I promised myself, he would be out of danger.
To be sure he shook his head when I spoke of this hope, and in the
intervals of sleep--of sleep in which I rejoiced as the sweet
restorer--lay watching me, with a trouble in his eyes.

He no longer disobeyed my orders, but lay still and watched. My last
rag of shirt was gone now, torn up for bandages. Marc'antonio had
promised to bring fresh linen to-morrow. By night I slept with my
jacket about me. By day I worked naked to the waist, yet always with
a growing cheerfulness.

It was on the fourth afternoon, and while yet the sun stood a good
way above the pines, that the Princess Camilla deigned to revisit us.
I had carried Nat forth into the glade before the hut, where the sun
might fall on him temperately, after a torrid day--torrid, that is to
say, on the heights, but in our hollow, pight about with the trees,
the air had clung heavily.

Marc'antonio, an hour earlier than usual, came down the track with a
bundle of linen under his left arm. I did not see that any one
followed him until Nat pulled himself up, clutching at my elbow.

"Princess! Princess!" he cried, and his voice rang shrill towards her
under the boughs. "Help her . . . I cannot--"

His voice choked on that last word as she came forward and stood
regarding him carelessly, coldly, while I wiped the blood and then
the bloody froth from his lips.

"Your friend looks to be in an ill case," she said.

"You have k