“The gateway of Italy,” answered Wogan; and he drew the lash once or twice across the pony’s back and so was silent.  Clementina looked at his set and cheerless face, cheerless as that chill morning, and she too was silent.  She looked back along the road which she had traversed through snow and sunshine and clear nights of stars; she saw it winding out from the gates of Innspruck over the mountains, above the foaming river, and after a while she said very wistfully,—­

“There are worse lives than a gipsy’s.”

“Are there any better?” answered Wogan.

So this was what Mr. Wogan’s fine project had come to.  He remembered another morning when the light had welled over the hills, sunless and clear and cold, on the road to Bologna,—­the morning of the day when he had first conceived the rescue of Clementina.  And the rescue had been effected, and here was Clementina safe out of Austria, and Wogan sure of a deathless renown, of the accomplishment of an endeavour held absurd and preposterous; and these two short sentences were their summary and comment,—­

“There are worse lives than a gipsy’s.”

“Are there any better?”

Both had at this supreme crisis of their fortunes but the one thought,—­that the only days through which they had really lived were those last two days of flight, of hurry, of hope alternating with despair, of light-hearted companionship, days never to be forgotten, when each snatched meal was a picnic seasoned with laughter, days of unharnessed freedom lived in the open air.

Clementina was the first to perceive that her behaviour fell below the occasion.  She was safe in Italy, journeying henceforward safely to her betrothed.  She spurred herself to understand it, she forced her lips to sing aloud the Te Deum.  Wogan looked at her in surprise as the first notes were sung, and the woful appeal in her eyes compelled him to as brave a show as he could make of joining in the hymn.  But the words faltered, the tune wavered, joyless and hollow in that empty morning.

“Drive on,” said Clementina, suddenly; and she had a sense that she was being driven into bondage,—­she who had just been freed.  Wogan drove on towards Peri.

It was the morning of Sunday, the 30th of April; and as the little cart drew near to this hamlet of thirty cottages, the travellers could hear the single bell in the church belfry calling the villagers to Mass.  Wogan spoke but once to Clementina, and then only to point out a wooden hut which stood picturesquely on a wooded bluff of Monte Lessini, high up upon the left.  A narrow gorge down which a torrent foamed led upwards to the bluff, and the hut of which the windows were shuttered, and which seemed at that distance to have been built with an unusual elegance, was to Wogan’s thinking a hunting-box.  Clementina looked up at the bluff indifferently and made no answer.  She only spoke as Wogan drove past the church-door, and the sound of the priest’s voice came droning out to them.