cognised, and the city closed her
doors on him as carelessly as on any passing wanderer.

Beyond the gates a lad from the ducal stables waited with a horse. Odo
sprang into the saddle and rode on toward Pontesordo. The darkness was
growing thinner, and the meagre details of the landscape, with its
huddled farm-houses and mulberry-orchards, began to define themselves as
he advanced. To his left the field stretched, grey and sodden; ahead, on
his right, hung the dark woods of the ducal chase. Presently a bend of
the road brought him within sight of the keep of Pontesordo. His way led
past it, toward Valsecca; but some obscure instinct laid a detaining
hand on him, and at the cross-roads he bent to the right and rode across
the marshland to the old manor-house.

The farmyard lay hushed and deserted. The peasants who lived there would
soon be afoot; but for the moment Odo had the place to himself. He
tethered his horse to a gate-post and walked across the rough
cobble-stones to the chapel. Its floor was still heaped with farm-tools
and dried vegetables, and in the dimness a heavier veil of dust seemed
to obscure the painted walls. Odo advanced, picking his way among broken
ploughshares and stacks of maize, till he stood near the old marble
altar, with its sea-gods and acanthus volutes. The place laid its
tranquillising hush on him, and he knelt on the step beneath the altar.
Something stirred in him as he knelt there--a prayer, yet not a
prayer--a reaching out, obscure and inarticulate, toward all that had
survived of his early hopes and faiths, a loosening of old founts of
pity, a longing to be somehow, somewhere reunited to his old belief in
life.

How long he knelt he knew not; but when he looked up the chapel was full
of a pale light, and in the first shaft of the sunrise the face of Saint
Francis shone out on him...He went forth into the daybreak and rode away
toward Piedmont.

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