challenge on the spot.  As it was, he cried out, ’The letter! the letter!  Charge, for the honour of the army, and rescue the letter!’ Others echoed him:  ‘The letter! the letter! the English letter!’ A foreigner in an army can have as much provocation as he pleases; if he is anything of a favourite with his superiors, his fellows will task his forbearance.  Wilfrid Pierson glanced at the blade of his sword, and slowly sheathed it.  ‘Lieutenant Jenna is a good actor before a mob,’ he said.  ’Gentlemen, I rely upon you to make no noise about that letter; it is a private matter.  In an hour or so, if any officer shall choose to question me concerning it, I will answer him.’

The last remnants of the mob had withdrawn.  The officer in command at the gates threw a cloak over Wilfrid’s shoulders; and taking the arm of a friend Wilfrid hurried to barracks, and was quickly in a position to report himself to his General, whose first remark, ’Has the dead horse been removed?’ robbed him of his usual readiness to equivocate.  ’When you are the bearer of a verbal despatch, come straight to quarters, if you have to come like a fig-tree on the north side of the wall in Winter,’ said General Schoneck, who was joined presently by General Pierson.

’What ’s this I hear of some letter you have been barking about all over the city?’ the latter asked, after returning his nephew’s on-duty salute.

Wilfrid replied that it was a letter of his sister’s treating of family matters.

The two Generals, who were close friends, discussed the attack to which he had been subjected.  Wilfrid had to recount it with circumstance:  how, as he was nearing General Schoneck’s quarters at a military trot, six men headed by a leader had dashed out on him from a narrow side-street, unhorsed him after a struggle, rifled the saddlebags, and torn the coat from his back, and had taken the mark of his sword, while a gathering crowd looked on, hooting.  His horse had fled, and he confessed that he had followed his horse.  General Schoneck spoke the name of Countess Lena suggestively.  ‘Not a bit,’ returned General Pierson; ’the fellow courts her too hotly.  The scoundrels here want a bombardment; that ’s where it lies.  A dose of iron pills will make Verona a healthy place.  She must have it.’

General Schoneck said, ‘I hope not,’ and laughed at the heat of Irish blood.  He led Wilfrid in to the Marshal, after which Wilfrid was free to seek Lieutenant Jenna, who had gained the right to a similar freedom by pledging his honour not to fight within a stipulated term of days.  The next morning Wilfrid was roused by an orderly coming from his uncle, who placed in his hands a copy of Vittoria’s letter:  at the end of it his uncle had written, ’Rather astonishing.  Done pretty well; but by a foreigner.  “Affection” spelt with one “f.”  An Italian:  you will see the letters are emphatic at “ugly flag”; also “bloody and past forgiveness”