“He leaves Peri at nine,” said Wogan.  “He will have no time to make inquiries.  We have but to avoid the inn he stays at.  There is a second at the head of the village which we passed.”

To this second inn Wogan drove, and was welcomed by a shrewish woman whose sour face was warmed for once in a way into something like enthusiasm.

“A lodging indeed you shall have,” cried she, “and a better lodging than the Prince of Baden can look back upon, though he pay never so dearly for it.  Poor man, he will have slept wakefully this night!  Here, sir, you will find honest board and an honest bed for yourself and your sweet lady, and an honest bill to set you off in a sweet humour in the morning.”

“Nay, my good woman,” interrupted Wogan, hastily.  “This is no sweet lady of mine, nor are we like to stay until the morrow.  The truth is, we are a party of four, but our carriage snapped its axle some miles back.  The young lady’s uncle and aunt are following us, and we wait only for their arrival.”

Wogan examined the inn and thought the disposition of it very convenient.  It made three sides of a courtyard open to the road.  On the right and the bottom were farm-buildings and a stable; the inn was the wing upon the left hand.  The guest rooms, of which there were four, were all situated upon the first floor and looked out upon a little thicket of fir-trees at the back of the wing.  They were approached by a staircase, which ran up with a couple of turns from the courtyard itself and on the outside of the house-wall.  Wogan was very pleased with that staircase; it was narrow.  He was pleased, too, because there were no other travellers in the inn.  He went back to the landlady.

“It is very likely,” said he, “that my friends when they come will, after all, choose to stay here for the night.  I will hire all the rooms upon the first floor.”

The landlady was no less pleased than Mr. Wogan.  She had a thought that they were a runaway couple and served them breakfast in a little parlour up the stairs with many sly and confusing allusions.  She became confused, however, when after breakfast Clementina withdrew to bed, and Wogan sauntered out into the high-road, where he sat himself down on a bank to watch for Captain Misset.  All day he sat resolutely with his back towards the inn.  The landlady inferred that here were lovers quarrelling, and she was yet more convinced of it when she entered the parlour in the afternoon to lay the table for dinner and saw Clementina standing wistfully at the window with her eyes upon that unmoving back.  Wogan meanwhile for all his vigilance watched the road but ill.  Merchants, pedlars, friars, and gentlemen travelling for their pleasure passed down the road into Italy.  Mr. Wogan saw them not, or saw them with unseeing eyes.  His eyes were turned inwards, and he gazed at a picture that his heart held of a room in that inn behind him, where after all her dangers and fatigues a woman slept in peace.  Towards evening fewer travellers passed by, but there came one party of six well-mounted men whose leader suddenly bowed his head down upon his horse’s neck as he rode past.  Wogan had preached a sermon on the carelessness which comes with danger’s diminutions, but he was very tired.  The head was nodding; the blow might fall from nowhere, and he not know.