Rodolphe bit his lips and went away, without having been invited into the house, or taken into the part of the garden that lay between the front of the house and the shore of the little promontory.  On that side the house had a balcony above the first floor, made of wood, and covered by the roof, which projected deeply like the roof of a chalet on all four sides of the building, in the Swiss fashion.  Rodolphe had loudly praised the elegance of this arrangement, and talked of the view from that balcony, but all in vain.  When he had taken leave of the Bergmanns it struck him that he was a simpleton, like any man of spirit and imagination disappointed of the results of a plan which he had believed would succeed.

In the evening he, of course, went out in a boat on the lake, round and about the spit of land, to Brunnen and to Schwytz, and came in at nightfall.  From afar he saw the window open and brightly lighted; he heard the sound of a piano and the tones of an exquisite voice.  He made the boatman stop, and gave himself up to the pleasure of listening to an Italian air delightfully sung.  When the singing ceased, Rodolphe landed and sent away the boat and rowers.  At the cost of wetting his feet, he went to sit down under the water-worn granite shelf crowned by a thick hedge of thorny acacia, by the side of which ran a long lime avenue in the Bergmanns’ garden.  By the end of an hour he heard steps and voices just above him, but the words that reached his ears were all Italian, and spoken by two women.

He took advantage of the moment when the two speakers were at one end of the walk to slip noiselessly to the other.  After half an hour of struggling he got to the end of the avenue, and there took up a position whence, without being seen or heard, he could watch the two women without being observed by them as they came towards him.  What was Rodolphe’s amazement on recognizing the deaf-mute as one of them; she was talking to Miss Lovelace in Italian.

It was now eleven o’clock at night.  The stillness was so perfect on the lake and around the dwelling, that the two women must have thought themselves safe; in all Gersau there could be no eyes open but theirs.  Rodolphe supposed that the girl’s dumbness must be a necessary deception.  From the way in which they both spoke Italian, Rodolphe suspected that it was the mother tongue of both girls, and concluded that the name of English also hid some disguise.

“They are Italian refugees,” said he to himself, “outlaws in fear of the Austrian or Sardinian police.  The young lady waits till it is dark to walk and talk in security.”

He lay down by the side of the hedge, and crawled like a snake to find a way between two acacia shrubs.  At the risk of leaving his coat behind him, or tearing deep scratches in his back, he got through the hedge when the so-called Miss Fanny and her pretended deaf-and-dumb maid were at the other end of the path; then, when they had come within twenty yards of him without seeing him, for he was in the shadow of the hedge, and the moon was shining brightly, he suddenly rose.