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He no longer experienced the vague dread which had followed him towards Possana, and made him glad of any delay that kept them from it. They entered the crooked, narrow street leading abruptly from the open country without any suburban hesitation into the heart of the ruin, which kept a vivid image of uninterrupted mediaeval life.
Where are we going to-day?" She turned to Lanfear while her father answered: "I guess the doctor won't want to go very far, to-day, after his expedition yesterday afternoon." "Ah," she said, "I knew you had been somewhere! Was it very far? Are you too tired?" "It was rather far, but I'm not tired. I shouldn't advise Possana, though." "Possana?" she repeated. "What is Possana?"
"I think we've got the best part of it here, Miss Gerald," Lanfear broke the common silence by saying. "You couldn't see much more of Possana after you got there." "Besides," her father ventured a pleasantry which jarred on the younger man, "if you were there with the doctor yesterday, you won't want to make the climb again to-day. Give it up, Nannie!" "Oh no," she said, "I can't give it up."
"Well, then, we must go on, I suppose. Where do we begin our climb?" Lanfear explained that he had been obliged to leave his carriage at the foot of the hill, and climb to Possana Nuova by the donkey-paths of the peasants. He had then walked to the ruins of Possana Vecchia, but he suggested that they might find donkeys to carry them on from the new town. "Well, I hope so," Mr. Gerald grumbled.
"Or if you won't let him, let me. I don't want to go anywhere this morning." Lanfear thought that he did not wish her to go at all, and hoped that by the afternoon she would have forgotten Possana. She sighed, but in her sigh there was no concession.
But at Possana Nuova no saddle-donkeys were to be had, and he announced, at the café where they stopped for the negotiation, that he would wait for the young people to go on to Possana Vecchia, and tell him about it when they got back. In the meantime he would watch the game of ball, which, in the piazza before the café, appeared to have engaged the energies of the male population.
The donkey-girl had not ceased to cry out and bless herself, but suddenly, as her care was needed in getting Miss Gerald back to the litter, she became a part of the silence in which the procession made its way slowly into Possana Nuova, Lanfear going on one side, and Mr. Gerald on the other to support his daughter in her place.
They had halted at this point because, across a wide valley on the shoulder of an approaching height, the ruined village of Possana showed, and lower down and nearer the seat the new town which its people had built when they escaped from the destruction of their world-old home. World-old it all was, with reference to the human life of it; but the spring-time was immortally young in the landscape.
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