nglish oath stopped an arm that flashed a dagger half its
length. Wilfrid obeyed a command to declare his name, his country,
and his rank. "It's not the prince! it's not the Hungarian!" went many
whispers; and he was drawn away by a man who requested him to deliver
his reasons for entering the palace, and who appeared satisfied by
Wilfrid's ready mixture of invention and fact. But the cloak! Wilfrid
stated boldly that the cloak was taken by him from the Duchess of
Graatli's at Como; that he had seen a tall Hussar officer slip it off
his shoulders; that he had wanted a cloak, and had appropriated it.
He had entered the gate of the palace because of a woman's hand that
plucked at the skirts of this very cloak.

"I saw you enter," said the man; "do that no more. We will not have
the blood of Italy contaminated--do you hear? While that half-Austrian
Medole is tip-toeing 'twixt Milan and Turin, we watch over his honour,
to set an example to our women and your officers. You have outwitted us
to-night. Off with you!"

Wilfrid was twirled and pushed through the crowd till he got free of
them. He understood very well that they were magnanimous rascals who
could let an accomplice go, though they would have driven steel into the
principal.

Nothing came of this adventure for some time. Wilfrid's reflections
(apart from the horrible hard truth of Vittoria's marriage, against
which he dashed his heart perpetually, almost asking for anguish) had
leisure to examine the singularity of his feeling a commencement of
pride in the clasping of his musket;--he who on the first day of his
degradation had planned schemes to stick the bayonet-point between his
breast-bones: he thought as well of the queer woman's way in Countess
Medole's adjuration to him that he should never love a married
woman;--in her speaking, as it seemed, on his behalf, when it was but an
outcry of her own acute wound. Did he love a married woman? He wanted
to see one married woman for the last time; to throw a frightful look on
her; to be sublime in scorn of her; perhaps to love her all the better
for the cruel pain, in the expectation of being consoled. While doing
duty as a military machine, these were the pictures in his mind; and
so well did his routine drudgery enable him to bear them, that when
he heard from General Schoneck that the term of his degradation was to
continue in Italy, and from his sister that General Pierson refused
to speak of him or hear of him