irst time in his
life without a lift of the heart--the long glittering rampart of the
Alps.

"Do we cross them?"

"_Pianu_. . . . In time, O beloved; thou and I . . . all in good
time."

I gazed up at her, half-frightened by the tenderness in her voice;
and what I saw frightened me wholly. The sullenness had gone from
her eyes; as a mother upon the child in her lap, so she looked down
upon me; but her face was wan, even in the warm sunlight, and
pinched, and hollow-eyed. I lifted her hand--a little way only, my
own being so weak. It was frail, transparent, as though wasted by
very hunger.

She read the question I could not ask, and answered it with a brave
laugh. (It appeared, then, that she had taught herself to laugh.)

"We have been sick, thou and I. The mountains will cure us."

I looked along the road towards them, then up at her again.
I remembered afterwards that though she spoke so cheerfully of the
mountains, her gaze had turned from them, to travel back across the
plain.

"A little while!" she went on. "We must wait a little while to
recover our strength. But there are friends yonder, to help us."

"Friends?" I echoed, wondering that I possessed any.

"You must leave all talk to me," she commanded; "and, if you are
rested, we ought not to sit idling here." She helped the driver to
lift me back into the waggon, where, as it moved on, she seated
herself in the straw and took my hand. All her shyness had gone,
with all her sullenness.

"There is a farm," began she, "a bare twelve leagues from here, says
the waggoner, who knows it. I carry a letter to the farmer from his
brother, who is the parish priest of Trecate, and a good man.
He says that his brother, too, is a good man, and will show us
kindness for his sake, because the farm once belonged to my friend,
as the elder, until he gave it up to follow God. The pair have not
met since twenty years; for Trecate lies not far from Milan, and the
farm is deep in the mountains, above a village called Domodossola,
where the folk are no travellers. . . ."

Here her voice faded into a dream again; for a very little waking
wearied me, then and for weeks to come, and the word Milano brought
back the church, the stained window, the priest's voice talking, and
confused all these with the rumbling of the waggon. But I held my
love's hand, and that was enough.

We came that same evening to the shore of a lake, beautiful as a pool
dropped out of Pa