again to the window that was no window, the
rumble of wheels, the plodding of a horse's hoofs. Beyond the low
arch--or was it a pent?--shone a star or two, and against their pale
radiance a shadow loomed--the shadow of the Princess, still seated,
still patient, still with her hands in her lap. The rumble of the
wheels, the slow rocking of my bed beneath me, fitted themselves to
the intermittent flash of the stars, and beat out a rhythm in my
memory--a rhythm, and by degrees the words to fit it--

"Tanto ch'io vidi delle cose belle
Che porta il ciel, per un pertugio tondo,
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle."

_A riveder le stelle_--I closed my eyes, opened them again, and lo!
the stars were gone. In their place shone pale dawn, touching the
grey-white arch of a tilt-waggon, on the floor of which I lay in a
deep litter of straw. But still by the tilt, between me and the
dawn, rested my love, and drowsed, still patient, her hands in her
lap.

"At last! At last!"

She called to the driver--I could not see him, for I lay with my face
to the tilt--and he pulled up his horse with a jolt. Belike he had
been slumbering, and with the same jolt awoke himself. I tried to
lift a hand--I think to brush away the illusion of the window and its
painted panes.

Maybe, slight as it was, she mistook the movement to mean that I felt
stifled under the hood of the waggon and wanted air. At any rate,
she called again, and the driver (I have clean forgotten his face),
left his reins and came around to her. Between them they lifted me
out and laid me on a bank between the road and a water-course that
ran beside it. I heard the water rippling, near by, and presently
felt the cool, delicious touch of it as she dipped up a little in her
hollowed palms and moistened my bandages.

Our waggon had come to a halt in the very centre (as it seemed) of a
great plain, criss-crossed with dykes and lines of trees, and dotted
with distant hamlets. The hamlets twinkled in the fresh daylight,
and in the nearest one--a mile back on the road--a fine campanile
stood up against the sun, which pierced through three windows in its
topmost story. So flat was the plain that mere sky filled
nine-tenths of the prospect; and all the wide dome of it tinkled with
the singing of larks.

"_Ma dove? dove?_ . . ."

The Princess pointed, and far on the road, miles beyond the waggon,
I saw that which no man, sick or hale, sees for the f