and the radiant foam, while
band-music played to a great company of visitors, and sounds of thunder
drew near. Over the mountains above the Adige, the leaden fingers of an
advance of the thunder-cloud pushed slowly, and on a sudden a mighty gale
sat heaped blank on the mountain-top and blew. Down went the heads of the
poplars, the river staggered in its leap, the vale was shuddering grey.
It was like the transformation in a fairy tale; Beauty had taken her old
cloak about her, and bent to calamity. The poplars streamed their length
sideways, and in the pauses of the strenuous wind nodded and dashed
wildly and white over the dead black water, that waxed in foam and
hissed, showing its teeth like a beast enraged. Laura and Vittoria joined
hands and struggled for shelter. The tent of a travelling circus from the
South, newly-pitched on a grassplot near the river, was caught up and
whirled in the air and flung in the face of a marching guard of soldiery,
whom it swathed and bore sheer to earth, while on them and around them a
line of poplars fell flat, the wind whistling over them. Laura directed
Vittoria's eyes to the sight. "See," she said, and her face was set hard
with cold and excitement, so that she looked a witch in the uproar;
"would you not say the devil is loose now Angelo is abroad?" Thunder and
lightning possessed the vale, and then a vertical rain. At the first
gleam of sunlight, Laura and Vittoria walked up to the Laubengasse--the
street of the arcades, where they made purchases of numerous needless
articles, not daring to enter the Italian's shop. A woman at a fruitstall
opposite to it told them that no carriage could have driven up there.
During their great perplexity, mud and rain-stained soldiers, the same
whom they had seen borne to earth by the flying curtain, marched before
the shop; the shop and the house were searched; the Italian and his old
liming wife were carried away.

"Tell me now, that storm was not Angelo's friend!" Laura muttered.

"Can he have escaped?" said Vittoria.

"He is 'on horseback.'" Laura quoted the Italian proverb to signify that
he had flown; how, she could not say, and none could inform her. The joy
of their hearts rose in one fountain.

"I shall feel better blood in my body from this moment," Laura said; and
Vittoria, "Oh! we can be strong, if we only resolve."

"You want to sing?"

"I do."

"I shall find pleasure in your voice now."

"The wicked voice!"

"Yes, the v