When she opened her eyes the robbers who were left had stopped fighting, and had lighted the candles, and were counting their dead and wounded. When she saw her dear father and mother and her friends lying cold and still beside her, she began to sob and cry. As soon as the robbers knew that she lived, they thrust her back into the darkest of their caves. The most cruel of all the robbers was her gaoler. He would not allow her to bind up her wound, and he gave her scarcely anything to eat or to drink. He would not even let her rest, and so, in pain and hunger and sadness, Pastorella passed her weary nights and days.
Now when Calidore got back from his hunting, he expected to hear the shepherds’ pipes, and their songs, and the bleating of the sheep, and to see Pastorella in her dainty gown and with flowers in her golden hair coming to meet him.
Instead of that, the place which had been so gay was sad and silent. The cottages were smouldering black ruins, and there was no living creature there.
Calidore wildly sought everywhere for some trace of Pastorella. But when he sought her in the woods and called ‘Pastorella ... Pastorella ...’, only the trees echoed ‘Pastorella.’ In the plains he sought her, but they lay silent and lonely under the stars, and they, too, only echoed ‘Pastorella ... Pastorella....’
Week after week he searched for her, until one day he saw a man running across the plain. The man’s hair was standing up on his head as if he were in a terrible fright, and his clothes were in rags.
When he got near, Calidore saw that it was Corydon.
‘Where is Pastorella?’ eagerly asked Calidore.
Corydon burst into tears.
‘Ah, well-a-day,’ he said, ‘I saw fair Pastorella die!’
He then told Calidore all about the robbers’ raid, and all that had happened in that dreadful cave. Only one thing he did not know. He did not know that Pastorella was alive. He had seen her fall down, and he thought that she was dead.