ng
the agitation of unnumbered doubts, she ran less peril in the wilds
where her husband fled, than in her home.

"I will trust to her idolatrously, as you do," Countess Ammiani said;
"and perhaps she has already proved to me that I may."

Merthyr saw Agostino while riding out of Milan, and was seen by him;
but the old man walked onward, looking moodily on the stones, and merely
waved his hand behind.

CHAPTER XLVI

THE LAST

There is hard winter overhead in the mountains when Italian Spring
walks the mountain-sides with flowers, and hangs deep valley-walls with
flowers half fruit; the sources of the rivers above are set about with
fangs of ice, while the full flat stream runs to a rose of sunlight.
High among the mists and snows were the fugitives of Brescia, and
those who for love or pity struggled to save them wandered through the
blooming vales, sometimes hearing that they had crossed the frontier
into freedom, and as often that they were scattered low in death and
captivity. Austria here, Switzerland yonder, and but one depth between
to bound across and win calm breathing. But mountain might call to
mountain, peak shine to peak; a girdle of steel drove the hunted men
back to frosty heights and clouds, the shifting bosom of snows and
lightnings. They saw nothing of hands stretched out to succour. They saw
a sun that did not warm them, a home of exile inaccessible, crags like
an earth gone to skeleton in hungry air; and below, the land of
their birth, beautiful, and sown everywhere for them with torture and
captivity, or death, the sweetest. Fifteen men numbered the escape from
Brescia. They fought their way twice through passes of the mountains,
and might easily, in their first dash Northward from the South-facing
hills, have crossed to the Valtelline and Engadine, but that in their
insanity of anguish they meditated another blow, and were readier to
march into the plains with the tricolour than to follow any course of
flight. When the sun was no longer in their blood they thought of reason
and of rest; they voted the expedition to Switzerland, that so they
should get round to Rome, and descended from the crags of the Tonale,
under which they were drawn to an ambush, suffering three of their party
killed, and each man bloody with wounds. The mountain befriended them,
and gave them safety, as truth is given by a bitter friend. Among icy
crags and mists, where the touch of life grows dull as the nail of a