complaining to the old Marshal, who was too true a soldier to condemn
a soldier in action, however strong his disapproval of proceedings.
The liberty assumed by Karl was excessive; he spoke out in the midst of
General officers as if his views were shared by them and the Marshal;
and his error was soon corrected; one after another reproached
him, until the Marshal, pitying his condition, sent him into his
writing-closet, where he lectured the youth on military discipline.
It chanced that there followed between them a question upon what the
General in command at Brescia would do with his prisoners; and hearing
that they were subject to the rigours of a court-martial, and if
adjudged guilty, would forthwith summarily be shot, Karl ventured to ask
grace for Vittoria's husband. He succeeded finally in obtaining his kind
old Chief's promise that Count Ammiani should be tried in Milan, and as
the bearer of a paper to that effect, he called on his sisters to get
them or Wilfrid to convey word to Vittoria of her husband's probable
safety. He found Anna in a swoon, and Lena and the duchess bending
over her. The duchess's chasseur Jacob Baumwalder Feckelwitz had been
returning from Moran, when on the Brescian high-road he met the spy
Luigi, and acting promptly under the idea that Luigi was always a
pestilential conductor of detestable correspondence, he attacked him,
overthrew him, and ransacked him, and bore the fruit of his sagacious
exertions to his mistress in Milan; it was Violetta d'Isorella's letter
to Carlo Ammiani. "I have read it," the duchess said; "contrary to any
habits when letters are not addressed to me. I bring it open to your
sister Anna. She catches sight of one or two names and falls down in the
state in which you see her."

"Leave her to me," said Karl.

He succeeded in extracting from Anna hints of the fact that she had
paid a large sum of her own money to Countess d'Isorella for secrets
connected with the Bergamasc and Brescian rising. "We were under a
mutual oath to be silent, but if one has broken it the other cannot; so
I confess it to you, dearest good brother. I did this for my country at
my personal sacrifice."

Karl believed that he had a sister magnificent in soul. She was glad to
have deluded him, but she could not endure his praises, which painted to
her imagination all that she might have been if she had not dashed her
patriotism with the low cravings of vengeance, making herself like some
ab