motion and vision and the gladness of bright weather. What he longed for were amorous secrecy, forbidden delights, the silent ways of an old city that he knew, the warm loveliness of a woman who had leaned from her casement to draw him the sooner upward to her arms.
Nature was nothing to him—to him said nothing. What he longed for with intolerable weariness was once more himself to live. At his age men cling to life tenaciously, and death appals at all ages the Latin temperament. Yet even he at times felt tempted to make an end of this dull, torpid, aimless existence, maintained at such difficulty and in such hardship: the life of a hawk, half-starved, in an iron cage. Often when she was away he looked at the keen-edged dagger, or thought of the deep pools of this wilderness, where none but the moorhens and mallards would see a human life come to its last rest amidst the reeds.
But he was young, and so against all reason hope remained with him, and made endurance possible.
It was November weather; brilliant and luminous, with noons warm as summer, and
