Page:Maurice Hewlett--Little novels of Italy.djvu/230

218 ings and shoes. Then he helped himself to his dead master's pair, to his sword and velvet gown; and—

"Now," he said, "we may start by the privy garden."

He led the way. It was a golden afternoon of late summer; the shadows were lengthening as the air grew tired and cool, all the place was full of that vast peace in which a day of strenuous heat sinks to rest. The faint breeze in the myrtles was like a sleeper's sigh:—

"Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbræ—" murmured Grifone to himself, as he slipped among the cypresses over the grass. Molly followed him with faltering knees, nearly spent. As always, she was at the mercy of a clear head, never masterless when a man was near her. Morally, nervously, she seemed to be dead; so she followed her new lord as meekly as she had followed her old—that one to Nona across the seas, this one by gloomy, pent ways through the stale-smelling streets of the city to the Rocca del Capitan Vecchio.

Meekly enough she went, yet not so far nor so meekly but that she gave Grifone a genuine surprise. It seems that the air, the exercise, precautions, what-not, had cried back her escaped wits: certain it is that, once in the storm-bitten old fortress, she thanked her leader and rescuer with a tremulous sweetness all her own, and then—by Heaven and Earth!—urged him gently to go back, "lest her honour should be breathed upon."

Her honour! Grifone, the romancer, turned