FOR TWO DAYS the sun had been cut away by an opaque, pale-grey, absolutely cloudless sky; this made the shapes of hills and houses more important; an ascent of the heights became arduous in the cool, close air and one was loath to go far up any one of the valleys because one felt it shutting on one like a book. The disappearance of sunlight from the flowers deadened the colours of them; from being like flames, spontaneous, they became tawdry and adventitious; bougainvillæa traced a heavy pattern on the walls, geraniums were the flat stale pink of old confectionery, and the mimosa blotched the faces of the hills as monotone and pale as mustard. The distances were pellucid; one would see for miles every detail of the coast, every ripple of the light sea, and these became important and a little ominous; one felt weighed down by them and half uneasy. Ronald, going alone up a riverbed in one of the valleys, found himself hurrying.

The river had once been expansive and impetuous, it had carried some of the hills along with it and flowed widely; at some points it had taken up the whole floor of the valley, leaping past the foot of the rocks hilariously or, dividing, made a long string of lemon-shaped islands. Now its wide bed lay parched, a petrified torrent up which Ronald, taking some pleasure in the performance, walked painfully with a sharp, continuous, loudly-echoed clattering together of stones. The river was young no longer; it had made an end of its variations and detours and had worn away for itself a very deep channel down which it flowed swiftly, and with a sinister effect of purpose; steel-smooth, impenetrable to the eye of Ronald, to whom it was no longer a companion. They should have known one another centuries before.

The margins of land on either side, before the walls of the valley went up, were under cultivation; they were divided cross-wise, and when Ronald scrambled up out of the riverbed to sit down on a sagging lip of turf and nurse a barked ankle or extract a stone from his shoe it is more than probable that he was trespassing. In such a country, however, one is bound to trespass everywhere; much is forgiven if one be sufficiently beautiful, have an innocent expression and do not seem to understand Italian shouted from above. Ronald’s expression, ingenuous and nervous as a foal’s, would have disarmed the angriest proprietor, but for this there was no occasion; the valley seemed to be quite empty. Since he had left behind the three young women, the goats, the staring man, there had been nobody. Perhaps, he thought, the valley was today just too narrow, too clothed in the echo of water, too deep beneath the tension of the sky from hill to hill, and they had ail turned back instinctively. He wondered at himself for going on.