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A vision of his own body, stark and stiff, lying under a mound of drifting snow, swiftly passed before his mind. He threw it off wrathfully. "Not yet! Not just yet!" he shouted in defiance into the face of the howling storm. Through the tumult and confusion of his thoughts one idea dominated he must make the hill-top.

"Here, what in the world are you men doing there?" came in the stentorian tones of the Colonel, who it startled Si to discover was sitting a short distance behind him. "Put that light out this instant." Even before the command could be obeyed, four great flashes burned out like lightning in the murky darkness on the hill-top.

One knew the way as well as another; but Silvestro led it. They rounded the hill-top. "Here we are at last," said Silvestro. "Let us sit here, and look at the splendour of the night. Oh, Pilade! Oh, dear friend! How couldst thou do so much for me?" "What else could I do?" said he gruffly. "You never killed the pig-Jew." "Nor did you, Pilade. Tell me why you gave yourself up."

Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of a moral world beheld its intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto.

Then he scraped his pallet and washed his brushes, and seated himself upon the sofa opposite the easel. There was no picture, of Diana or of Endymion any longer. In the place of Diana there was a full summer moon shining calmly in a cloudless heaven. Its benignant light fell upon a solitary grave upon a hill-top, which filled the spot where Endymion had lain.

About twenty minutes after the beginning of the shots, when all the party on the hill-top were edging nearer to the battle, taking a few steps at a time, on tenter-hooks to be engaged, we heard a great gallop of horses' hoofs coming to us at full tilt.

At six o'clock this morning, I saw a mountain-shepherd stand at a gate on the hill-top. Seven sheep were on the outside of the gate six of the shepherd's flock, the other a strayer. The man wanted his own sheep in; so, before opening the gate, he quietly said: "'Rob, catch the strayer."

For there could be no doubt that Annette's mother had received an intimation of some sort from the other world, the night before her child was born. She had been found lying senseless in the moonlight on the hill-top, and had never spoken from that hour till her death a week afterwards.

That's Assisi over yonder, that strange white town that clings by its eyelashes to the sloping hill-side: and those are the snowclad heights of the Gran Sasso beyond; and that's Montefalco to the extreme right, where the sunset gleam just catches the hill-top." His words struck dumb horror into Herminia's soul. Poor child, how she shrank at it!

Their camp-fires blazed from every hill-top. "Your regiment seems to have turned out to a man!" exclaimed Ford admiringly. "MY regiment!" snorted the officer. "You've passed through five regiments already, and there are as many more in the dark places. They're everywhere!" he cried jubilantly. "And I thought they were only where you see the camp-fires," exclaimed Ford.