ed to speak, and sat trembling. A divination
of intense hatred had perhaps read the thought within her breast: or it
was a mere outburst of hate. The woman's face was like the wearing away
of smoke from a spot whence shot has issued. Vittoria walked for the
remainder of the day. That fearful companion oppressed her. She felt
that one who followed armies should be cast in such a frame, and now
desired with all her heart to render full obedience to Carlo, and abide
in Brescia, or even in Milan--a city she thought of shyly.

The march was hurried to the slopes of the Vicentino, for enemies were
thick in this district. Pericles refused to quit the soldiers, though
Count Karl used persuasion. The young nobleman said to Vittoria, "Be
on your guard when you meet my sister Anna. I tell you, we can be as
revengeful as any of you: but you will exonerate me. I do my duty; I
seek to do no more."

At an inn that they reached toward evening she saw the innkeeper shoot a
little ball of paper at an Italian corporal, who put his foot on it and
picked it up. The soldier subsequently passed through the ranks of his
comrades, gathering winks and grins. They were to have rested at the
inn, but Count Karl was warned by scouts, which was sufficient to make
Pericles cling to him in avoidance of the volunteers, of whom mainly he
was in terror. He looked ague-stricken. He would not listen to her, or
to reason in any shape. "I am on the sea--shall I trust a boat? I stick
to a ship," he said. The soldiers marched till midnight. It was arranged
that the carriage should strike off for Schio at dawn. The soldiers
bivouacked on the slope of one of the low undulations falling to the
Vicentino plain. Vittoria spread her cloak, and lay under bare sky, not
suffering the woman to be ejected from the carriage. Hitherto Luigi had
avoided her. Under pretence of doubling Count Karl's cloak as a pillow
for her head, he whispered, "If the signorina hears shots let her lie on
the ground flat as a sheet." The peacefulness surrounding her precluded
alarm. There was brilliant moonlight, and the host of stars, all dim;
and first they beckoned her up to come away from trouble, and then,
through long gazing, she had the fancy that they bent and swam about
her, making her feel that she lay in the hollows of a warm hushed sea.
She wished for her lover.

Men and officers were lying at a stone's-throw distant. The Tyrolese
had lit a fire for cooking purposes, by which fo