“But to-night?”
“To-night I feel it.”
“How far away the Outliers seem to-night. Look down there in the hollow, there is not one stirring. How could one say there is now any grief or captivity down there? Mona, do you really believe there are any Outliers?”
“Ah, I’m good at believing.”
The moon dropped down behind the hill till there was but one shining jewel point of it winking on the world. The chill that comes before the morning began to temper the air and I shivered under it.
“You are cold,” cried Herman; “wait.” He slipped away in the scrub and brought back skins in which he wrapped me. “Have you had any sleep at all to-night? Where is your hand, Mona?” He drew it through his arm. “Now, if you will lean back against the oak here, and against my shoulder, so: now you may get some rest.”
I leaned against the oak and touched his sleeve with my cheek. I had not meant to do more than that, nor yet to sleep, but the oak swayed a little comfortingly, so still and soft and dark the night was—suddenly there was the morning freshness and Trastevera calling me awake.
I saw the dark green of the earth shining wet, the faint, ineffable green of the dawn, and between them spread a veil of silvery mist. Down in the hollow the Outliers were all astir; rearward two lines of men moved toward the Gap. I saw them disappear in the willows and emerge again in the stream rounding the point of the Ledge. They walked mid-thigh in the turbid water and braced themselves against the force of its running. I saw the lines bend and right themselves like the young willows. These were the Far-Folk moving under guard toward Leaping Water. Below us as we came down the knoll were Mancha, Prassade, Noche and some others, with one in their midst whom, as they turned and looked toward us expectantly, I recognized as Ravenutzi. He looked dry, I thought, and stripped. His glance, which took me dully, when at last it was aware of me, appeared to turn inward for an instant as if to call that old excluding charm of personality. I felt it flicker and expire. But all that group continuing to look toward us curiously as we went down, I enquired of Trastevera what it meant.
“It is Herman,” she said. “They wait for him. Mancha has asked if he would like to go a day’s journey with them.”
“He will go,” I answered for him, for I knew at once whither that journey tended, and what they would find at the end of it. To this day I do not know what prompted Mancha to invite him. Whether he thought the opportunity due to him who had first gone on the trail of that unhappy girl. Whether he had some inkling of Herman’s state of mind, and divined in him an excusing understanding of his own hopeless infatuation, I do not know. At any rate he would not set out on that day’s business without Herman. That was how we learned what happened in the Place of Caves, half a day beyond Windy Covers, and as much as was ever known of what had occurred between Ravenutzi and the Maiden Ward, no maid by now, and in a more inviolable wardship.