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 sibility of drawing near to him, he should escape her sight and go whither she could not follow him. When sleep conquered her despite herself, and pressed her heavy eyelids downwards, she awoke with the apprehension of his having gone away from his resting-place during the night whilst she slept. If she once fairly lost him from view, she might, she knew, never come on his track again; and now that she had left the territory that was familiar to her, and crossed the Fiora water, and come upon lands that were utterly strange to her, she might, if she lost sight of him, lose her own way hopelessly, and perish of hunger on the waste.

He, she saw, turned aside at times into the huts of shepherds or of the ploughmen come to till the corn-lands, and there no doubt ate, and paid for what he ate with Sardinian pence, and no doubt told them he was a shepherd, too, going towards the Campagna to rejoin his flocks. But she had only the loaf of bread and the handful of maize she had brought with her; they would last her, eaten sparingly, four or five days, but after that she would have nothing except the one little silver piece, and she