As they drew near the town, whose ruin began more and more to
reveal itself in the roofless walls and windowless casements, they saw a
man coming towards them, at whose approach Lanfear instinctively put
himself forward. The man did not look at them, but passed, frowning
darkly, and muttering and gesticulating.
Miss Gerald turned in her litter and followed him with a long gaze. The
peasant girl said gayly in Italian: "He is mad; the earthquake made him
mad," and urged the donkey forward.
Lanfear, in the interest of science, habitually forbade himself the
luxury of anything like foreboding, but now, with the passing of the
madman, he felt distinctively a lift from his spirit. 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. There, till
within the actual generation, people had dwelt, winter and summer, as
they had dwelt from the beginning of Christian times, with nothing to
intimate a domestic or civic advance.
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