love and passion of youth shoots higher than all other glories into the
sky of time. The splendour of youth is its madness, and the splendour of
that madness is its unconquerable belief. And great is the strength of
it, because violence alone can destroy it. It does not yield to time nor
to decay, to the long wash of experience that wears away the stone, nor
to disintegration. It is always broken into pieces at a blow. In the
morning all is well, and ere the evening come the radiant temple is in
ruins.

At night when Guida went to bed she could not sleep at first. Then came
a drowsing, a floating between waking and sleeping, in which a hundred
swift images of her short past flashed through her mind:

A butterfly darting in the white haze of a dusty road, and the cap of the
careless lad that struck it down.... Berry-picking along the hedges
beyond the quarries of Mont Mado, and washing her hands in the strange
green pools at the bottom of the quarries. . . . Stooping to a stream
and saying of it to a lad: "Ro, won't it never come back?" . . . From
the front doorway watching a poor criminal shrink beneath the lash with
which he was being flogged from the Vier Marchi to the Vier Prison. . .
Seeing a procession of bride and bridegroom with young men and women gay
in ribbons and pretty cottons, calling from house to house to receive the
good wishes of their friends, and drinking cinnamon wine and mulled
cider--the frolic, the gaiety of it all. Now, in a room full of people,
she was standing on a veille flourished with posies of broom and
wildflowers, and Philip was there beside her, and he was holding her
hand, and they were waiting and waiting for some one who never came.
Nobody took any notice of her and Philip, she thought; they stood there
waiting and waiting--why, there was M. Savary dit Detricand in the
doorway, waving a handkerchief at her, and saying: "I've found it--I've