patiently; but the
old sergeant lifted a vast gnarled hand and wagged it at him with a
kind of elderly rebuke.

"They're getting away in dozens every day," he rumbled. He put his
hands on the silent man and turned him where he stood to face the
light. "Yes," he said; "you've been knocking him about, too!"

The man had spoken no word; he showed now to the flush of the evening
a face young and strongly molded, from which all passion, all force,
seemed to have been drawn in and absorbed. It was calm as the face of
a sleeper is calm; only the mark of Captain Hahn's blow, the great
swollen bruise on the brow, touched it with a memory of violence. His
eyes traveled beyond Jovannic and paused, looking. Upon the pebble
path beside the screen of yews a foot sounded; Jovannic turned.

It was the Contessina; she came hurrying towards them. Jovannic
saluted. Only two or three times had he stood as close to her as
then; and never before had he seen her swift in movement, or anything
but grave and measured in gait, gesture and speech. He stared in
surprise at her tall slenderness as it stood in relief against the
rose and bronze of the west.

"It is" she was a little breathless. "It is yes! young Luigi!" The
prisoner, silent till then, stirred and made some little noise of
acquiescence. Behind him, still holding to the cord that bound his
wrists, his two stolid guards stared uncomprehendingly; the old
sergeant, his face one wrinkled mass of bland knowingness, stood with
his thumbs in his belt and his short, fat legs astraddle. She leaned
forward she seemed to sway like a wind-blown stalk and stared at the
prisoner's quiet face. Jovannic saw her lips part in a movement of
pain. Then her face came round to him.

"You, oh!" she gasped at him. "You haven't, you didn't strike him?"

Jovannic stared at her. He understood nothing. Granted that she knew
the man, as no doubt she knew every peasant of the village, he still
didn't understand the touch of agony in her manner and her voice.

"No, signorina," he answered stiffly. "I have not touched him. In
fact, I was ordering him to be unbound."

But Her eyes traveled again to the prisoner's bruised and defaced
brow; she was breathing quickly, like a runner. "Who, then? Who has?"

The old sergeant wagged his disreputable head. "German handwriting,
that is, my young lady," he croaked. "That's how our German lords and
masters curse them! write their Gott mit uns! The noble Captain Hahn