"
Stephanu spread out his hands. "The Prince, and the reverend
Father--who can tell what passes in their minds?"
"Not you, at any rate! Very well, then--the Princess was
apprehensive. . . . Yet now, when the mischief (whatever it is)
should either be done or on the point of doing, she will have none of
our help. Clearly she knows more, yet will have none of our help.
That is altogether puzzling to me. . . . And she sends us
north. . . . Very well again; we will go north, but not far!"
He glanced back at me over his shoulder. I read his meaning--that he
wished to plan his campaign privately with Stephanu--and, reining in
my pony, I fell back out of earshot.
The pass towards which we were climbing stood perhaps three thousand
feet above the shore and the high road we had left; and the track,
when it reached the steeper slopes, ran in long zigzagging terraces
at the angles of which our ponies had sometimes to scramble up
stairways cut in the living rock. As the sun sank a light mist
gradually spread over the coast below us, the distant islands grew
dim, and we rode suspended, as it were, over a bottomless vale and a
sea without horizon.
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