Then he begins his story of
". . . Our flight from dusk to clear,
Through day and night and day again to night
Once more, and to last dreadful dawn of all."
Thinking how they sat in silence, both so fearless and so safe, waking but now and then to consciousness of the wonder of it, he cries:
"You know this is not love, Sirs—it is faith,
The feeling that there's God."
By morning they had passed Perugia; Assisi was opposite. He met her look for the first time since they had started. . . . At Foligno he urged her to take a brief rest, but with eyes like a fawn's,
"Tired to death in the thicket, when she feels
The probing spear o' the huntsman,"
she had cried, "On, on to Rome, on, on"—and they went on. During the night she had a troubled dream, waving away something with wild arms; and Caponsacchi prayed (thinking "Why, in my life I never prayed before!") that the dream might go, and soon she slept peacefully. . . . When she woke, he answered her first look with the assurance that Rome was within twelve hours; no more of the terrible journey. But she answered that she wished it could last for ever: to be "with no dread"—
"Never to see a face nor hear a voice—
Yours is no voice; you speak when you are dumb;
Nor face, I see it in the dark" . . .
—such tranquillity was such heaven to her!