An hour's rest would recover her, she said, and
obediently lay down where I found a couch for her on a bank of
sweet-smelling heath above the road. I too wanted rest, and settled
myself down with my back against a citron tree, some twenty paces
distant.
Chaucer says somewhere (and it is true), that women take less sleep
and take it more lightly than men. It seemed to me that I had
scarcely closed my eyes before I opened them again at a touch on my
shoulder. The night was yet dark around us, save for the glow to the
northward, and at first I would hardly believe when the Princess told
me that I had been sleeping near upon three hours. Then it occurred
to me that for a long while the sky overhead had been shaking and
repeating the boom of cannon.
"There is firing to the south of us," she said; "and heavier firing
than where the light is. It comes from Nonza or thereabouts."
"Then it is no affair of ours, even if we could reach it. But the
flame yonder will lead us to my father."
So we took the white glimmering high-road again and stepped out
briskly, refreshed by sleep and the cool night air that went with us,
blowing softly across the ridges on our right.
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