nt 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 very wicked voice! But I shall be glad to hear it. You can
sing to-night, and drown those Lenkensteins."

"If my Carlo could hear me!"

"Ah!" sighed the signora, musing. "He is in prison now. I remember him,
the dearest little lad, fencing with my husband for exercise after they
had been writing a