I shall not have the physical strength to conceal it--and he can be a hard man when he is resisted! What am I to do?
I would go home at once--but--I might die on the way.

Why not ?' And then--in painful gasps--the physical situation had been revealed to her--the return of old symptoms and the reappearance of arrested disease.
The fear of the physical organism alternating with the despair of the lonely and abandoned soul,--never could Lucy forget the horror of that hour's talk, outwardly so quiet, as she sat holding Eleanor's hands in hers, and the floodgates of personality and of grief were opened before her.
* * * * * Meanwhile the patient, sweating horses climbed and climbed.

Soon they were at the brow of the hill, and looking back for their last sight of Orvieto.
And now they were on a broad tableland, a bare, sun-baked region where huge flocks of sheep, of white, black, and brown goats wandered with ragged shepherds over acres of burnt and thirsty pasture.

Here and there were patches of arable land and groups of tilling peasants in the wide untidy expanse; once or twice too an _osteria_, with its bush or its wine-stained tables under the shadow of its northern wall.

But scarcely a farmhouse.
Once indeed a great building like a factory or a workhouse, in the midst of wide sun-beaten fields.