of Præstanella, which he had bought with a faint but happy hope which he had never cared wholly to analyse; and his heart was heavy as he said to himself that there was no more for him to do than to turn his face for ever from this 'sun-bright waste,' which would haunt him, he thought, through all the remaining years of his life.
His eyes rested, without his knowing well what they saw, on the wide landscape beyond the columns of the loggia; on the slope of the olive-covered mountain bathed in morning vapour that drifted down and spread like a lake over all the wooded valleys and level pastures far away below. As he looked he saw a figure coming up the hillside, with the white mists all along it: a figure which always looked to him like the very divinity of the woods, which always seemed to him to have a forest fragrance and a wild doe's grace.
She came steadily upward, clothed in her garment of lamb's-wool, with a white cloth folded on her head as a ciociara wears it on the mountain ways that lie about Soracte and the Leonessa.
He saw her for awhile, mounting slowly
