He heard English voices.  A carriage had stopped almost in front of him.  A General officer was hat in hand, talking to a lady, who called him uncle, and said that she had been obliged to decide to quit Verona on account of her husband, to whom the excessive heat was unendurable.  Her husband, in the same breath, protested that the heat killed him.  He adorned the statement with all kinds of domestic and subterranean imagery, and laughed faintly, saying that after the fifteenth—­on which night his wife insisted upon going to the Opera at Milan to hear a new singer and old friend—­he should try a week at the Baths of Bormio, and only drop from the mountains when a proper temperature reigned, he being something of an invalid.

‘And, uncle, will you be in Milan on the fifteenth?’ said the lady; ’and Wilfrid, too?’

’Wilfrid will reach Milan as soon as you do, and I shall undoubtedly be there on the fifteenth,’ said the General.

‘I cannot possibly express to you how beautiful I think your army looks,’ said the lady.

’Fine men, General Pierson, very fine men.  I never saw such marching—­ equal to our Guards,’ her husband remarked.

The lady named her Milanese hotel as the General waved his plumes, nodded, and rode off.

Before the carriage had started, Barto Rizzo dashed up to it; and ’Dear good English lady,’ he addressed her, ’I am the brother of Luigi, who carries letters for you in Milan—­little Luigi!—­and I have a mother dying in Milan; and here I am in Verona, ill, and can’t get to her, poor soul!  Will you allow me that I may sit up behind as quiet as a mouse, and be near one of the lovely English ladies who are so kind to unfortunate persons, and never deaf to the name of charity?  It’s my mother who is dying, poor soul!’

The lady consulted her husband’s face, which presented the total blank of one who refused to be responsible for an opinion hostile to the claims of charity, while it was impossible for him to fall in with foreign habits of familiarity, and accede to extraordinary petitions.  Barto sprang up.  ‘I shall be your courier, dear lady,’ he said, and commenced his professional career in her service by shouting to the vetturino to drive on.  Wilfrid met them as he was trotting down from the Porta del Palio, and to him his sister confided her new trouble in having a strange man attached to her, who might be anything.  ‘We don’t know the man,’ said her husband; and Adela pleaded for him:  ’Don’t speak to him harshly, pray, Wilfrid; he says he has a mother dying in Milan.’  Barto kept his head down on his arms and groaned; Adela gave a doleful little grimace.  ‘Oh, take the poor beggar,’ said Wilfrid; and sang out to him in Italian:  ‘Who are you—­what are you, my fine fellow?’ Barto groaned louder, and replied in Swiss-French from a smothering depth:  ’A poor man, and the gracious lady’s servant till we reach Milan.’

‘I can’t wait,’ said Wilfrid; ’I start in half-an-hour.  It’s all right; you must take him now you’ve got him, or else pitch him out—­one of the two.  If things go on quietly we shall have the Autumn manoeuvres in a week, and then you may see something of the army.’  He rode away.  Barto passed the gates as one of the licenced English family.