With a little gesture of impatience, more at his fears than at the peril that aroused them, she moved away towards her litter.

“Your horse would be better for the loan of your cloak, sir stranger,” said Giacopo to me.

I knew him to be right, but shrugged my shoulders.

“Better the horse should die of cold than I,” I answered gruffly, and turning from him I set myself to pace the snow and stir the blood that was chilling in my veins.

There was a beauty in the white, sunlit landscape spread before me that compelled my glance.  To some it might compare but ill with the luxuriant splendour that is of the vernal season; but to me there was a wondrously impressive charm about that solemn, silent, virginal expanse of snow, expressionless as the Sphinx, and imposing and majestic by virtue of that very lack of expression.  From Fabriano, at our feet, was spread to the east, the broad plain that lies twixt the Esino and the Masone, as far as Mount Comero, which, in the distance, lifted its round shoulder from the haze of sea.  To the west the country lay under the same winding-sheet of snow as far as eye might range, to the towers of distant Perugia, to the Lake Trasimeno—­a silver sheen that broke the white monotony—­to Etruscan Cortona, perched like an eyrie on its mountain top, and to the line of Tuscan hills, like heavy, low-lying clouds upon the blue horizon.

Lost was I in the contemplation of that scene when a cry, succeeded by a volley of horrid blasphemy, drew my attention of a sudden to my companions.  They stood grouped together, and their eyes were on the road by which we had scaled those heights.  Their first expression of loud astonishment had been succeeded by an utter silence.  I stepped forward to command a better view of what they contemplated, and in the plain below, midway between Narni and the slopes, a mile or so behind us, I caught a glitter as of a hundred mirrors in the sunshine.  A company of some dozen men-at-arms it was, riding briskly along the tracks we had left behind us in the snow.  Could these be the pursuers?

Even as I formed the question in my mind, the lady’s silvery voice, behind me, put it into words.  She had drawn aside the curtains of her litter and she was leaning out, her eyes upon those dancing points of brilliance.

“Madonna,” cried one of her grooms, in a quaver of alarm, “they are Borgia soldiers.”

“Your fear is father to that opinion,” she answered scornfully.  “How can you descry it at this distance?”

Now, either God had given that knave an eagle’s sight, or else, as she suggested, fear spurred his imagination and begot his certainty of what he thought he saw.

“The leader’s bannerol bears the device of a red bull,” he answered promptly.

I thought she paled a little, and her brows contracted.

“In God’s name, let us get forward, then!” cried Giacopo.  “Orsu!  To horse, knaves!”