When that hour drew near, Mallard set out to walk a short distance along the road, to meet him.

Unlike the Sorrento side of the promontory, the mountains here rise suddenly and boldly out of the sea, towering to craggy eminences, moulded and cleft into infinite variety of slope and precipice, bastion and gorge.

Cut upon the declivity, often at vast sheer height above the beach, the road follows the curving of the hills.

Now and then it makes a deep loop inland, on the sides of an impassable chasm; and set in each of these recesses is a little town, white-gleaming amid its orchard verdure, with quaint and many-coloured campanile, with the semblance of a remote time.

Far up on the heights are other gleaming specks, villages which seem utterly beyond the traffic of man, solitary for ever in sun or mountain mist.
Mallard paid little heed to the things about him; he walked on and on, watching for a vehicle, listening for the tread of horses.