“Now take the dogs out with you instantly—­you hear, Adamo?  Argo, and Ponto the bull-dog, and Tuzzi and the others.  Take them and go down at once to the bottom of the cliffs.  Search among the rocks everywhere.  Creep along the vines-terraces, and through the olive-grounds.  Be sure when you go down below the cliffs to search the mouth of the chasm.  Go at once.  Set the dogs on all you find.  Argo will pin them.  He is a brave dog.  With Argo you are stronger than any one you will meet.  If you catch any men, take them at once to the municipality.  Wretches, they deserve it!—­poaching in my woods!  Listen—­before you go, tell Pipa to come to me soon.”

Pipa’s footsteps came clattering up the stairs to the marchesa’s room.  The light of the lamp she carried—­for it was already dark within the tower—­caught the spray of the fountain outside as she passed the narrow slits that served for windows.

“Pipa,” said the marchesa, as she stood before her in the doorway, a broad smile on her merry brown face, “set that lamp on the desk here before me.  So—­that will do.  Now go up-stairs and tell the Signorina Enrica that I bid her ‘Good-night,’ and that I will see her to-morrow morning after breakfast.  Then you may go to bed, Pipa.  I am busy, and shall sit up late.”  Pipa curtsied in silence, and closed the marchesa’s door.

CHAPTER III.

WHAT CAME OF BURNING THE MARCHESA’S PAPERS.

Midnight had struck from the church-clock at Corellia.  The strokes seemed to come slower by night than day, and sounded hollower.  Hours ago the last light had gone out.  The moon had set behind the cleft summits of La Pagna.  Distant thunder had died away among the rocks.  The night was close and still.  The villa lay in deep shadow, but the outline of the turrets of the tower were clearly marked against the starry sky.  All slept, or seemed to sleep.

A thin blue vapor curls out from the marchesa’s casement.  This vapor, at first light as a fog-drift, winds itself upward, and settles into a cloud, that hovers in the air.  Each moment the cloud rises higher and higher.  Now it has grown into a lurid canopy, that overhangs the tower.  A sudden glow from an arched loop-hole on the second story shows every bar of iron across it.  This is caught up below in a broad flash across the basin of the fountain.  Within there is a crackling as of dry leaves—­a clinging, heavy smell of heated air.  Another and another flame curls round the narrow loop-hole, twisting upward on the solid wall.

At this instant there is a low growl, as from a kicked dog.  A door below is banged-to and locked.  Then steps are heard upon the gravel.  It is Adamo.  He had returned, as the marchesa bade him, and has come to tell her he has searched everywhere—­down even to the reeds by the river Serchio (where he had discharged his gun at a water-hen), but had found no one, though all the way the dogs had sniffed and whined.