“Ah, poor sick eyes! Look, then! Dost thou not see the white worm of the Pampeluna road—below yonder, looping through the bushes?”
“I see it—yes, yes.”
“Now, follow upwards from the big coil, where the pine tree leans to the south, seeming a ladder between road and mound.”
“Stay—I have it.”
“Behold the Little Hump, the salt mine of St. Ildefonso, and once, they say, an island in the midst of a lake, which burst its banks and poured forth and was gone. And now thou knowest, Eugenio?”
He did not answer. He was intently fixing in his memory the position of the hill. She waited on his mood, not daring to risk his anger a second time, with a pathetic anxiety. Presently he heaved out a sigh, and turned on her, smiling.
“It is well,” he said. “Now conduct me to the spot where we met three days ago.”
It was surprisingly near at hand. A labyrinthine descent—by way of aloe-horned rocks, with sandy bents and tufts of harsh juniper between—of a hundred yards or so, and they were on the stony plateau which he remembered. There, to one side, was the coppice of chestnuts and locust trees. To the other, the road by which he had climbed went down with a run—such as he himself was on thorns to emulate—into the valleys trending to Saragossa. His eyes gleamed. He seated himself down on a boulder, controlling his impatience only by a violent effort.
“Anita,” he said, drilling out his speech with slow emphasis, “thou must leave me here alone awhile. I would think—I would think and plan, my heart. Go, wait on thy goats above, and I will return to thee presently.”
She sighed, and crept away obedient. O, forlorn, most forlorn soul of love, which, counting mistrust treason, knows itself a traitor! Yet Anita obeyed, and with no thought to eavesdrop, because she was in love with loyalty.