All night they rode beneath the stars, and on until some three hours
after sunrise, when they made halt in a hollow of the hills not far from
Fabriano. They tethered their horses in a grove of peaceful laurel and
sheltering mulberry, at the foot of a slope that was set with olive
trees, grey, gnarled and bent as aged cripples, and beside the river
Esino at a spot where it was so narrow that an agile man might leap its
width. Here, then, they spread their cloaks, and Zaccaria unpacked his
victuals, and set before them a simple meal of bread and wine and roasted
fowl, which to their hunger made more appeal than a banquet at another
season. And when they had eaten they laid them down beside the stream,
and there beguiled in pleasant talk the time until they fell asleep.
They rested them through the heat of the day, and waking some three hours
after noon, the Count rose up and went some dozen paces down the stream
to a spot where it fell into a tiny lake--a pool deep and blue as the
cloudless heavens which it mirrored. Here he stripped off his garments
and plunged headlong in, to emerge again, some moments later, refreshed
and reinvigorated in body and in soul.
As Fanfulla awoke he beheld an apparition coming towards him, a figure
lithe and stalwart as a sylvian god, the water shining on the ivory
whiteness of his skin and glistening in his sable hair as the sunlight
caught it.
"Tell me now, Fanfulla, lives there a man of so depraved a mind that he
would prefer a ducal crown to this?"
And the courtier, seeing Francesco's radiant mien, understood perhaps, at
last, how sordid was the ambition that could lure a man from such a god-
like freedom, and from the holy all-consuming joys it brought him.
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