d ease and enjoyment.

With all Frank's ardor for adventure, he was not sorry at all this. His
orders to fall back, in case he saw signs of a formidable movement, were
too peremptory to be disobeyed, and he would have turned away with great
reluctance from a picture so temptingly inviting. Now there was no need
to think of this. The great dome of the Milan Cathedral showed on the
horizon that he was not thirty miles from the Austrian headquarters,
while all around and about him vouched for perfect quiet and
tranquillity.

Tempted by a bright moonlight and the delicious freshness of the night,
he determined to push on as far as Lecco, where he could halt for the
day, and by another night-march reach Milan. Descending slowly, they
gained the plain before midnight, and now found themselves on that
narrow strip of road which, escarped from the rock, tracks the margin
of the lake for miles. Here Frank learned from a peasant that Lecco was
much too distant to reach before daybreak, and determined to halt at
Varenna, only a few miles off.

This man was the only one they had come up with for several hours, and
both Frank and Ravitzky remarked the alarm and terror he exhibited as he
suddenly found himself in the midst of them.

"Our cloth here," said the cadet, bitterly, "is so allied to thoughts
of tyranny and cruelty, one is not to wonder at the terror of that poor
peasant."

"He said Varenna was about five miles off," said Frank, who did not like
the spirit of the last remark, and wished to change the topic.

"Scarcely so much; but that as the road was newly mended, we should be
obliged to walk our cattle."

"Did you remark the fellow while we were talking,--how his eye wandered
over our party? I could almost swear that I saw him counting our
numbers."

"I did not notice that," said the cadet, with an almost sneering tone.
"I saw that the poor fellow looked stealthily about from side to side,
and seemed most impatient to be off."

"And when he did go," cried Frank, "I could not see what way he took.
His 'Felice notte, Signori,' was scarce uttered when he disappeared."

"He took us for a patrol," remarked the other, carelessly; and whether
it was this tone, or that Frank was piqued at the assumed coolness of
the cadet, he made no further remark, but rode on to the front of
the party. Shortly after this the moon disappeared; and as the road
occasionally passed through long tunnellings in the rock, the way became
to