‘I can’t help feeling a kindness to you for it,’ said Jacopo.

‘I can’t afford to leave you behind,’ Angelo accounted for his attention.

’Padrone, we’ve been understanding one another all along by our thumbs.  It’s that old inn of mine—­the taxes! we have to sell our souls to pay the taxes.  There’s the tongue of the thing.  I wouldn’t betray you; I wouldn’t.’

‘I’ll try you,’ said Angelo, and put him to proof next day, when the soldiers stopped them as they were driving in a cart, and Jacopo swore to them that Angelo was his intended son-in-law.

There was evidently an unusual activity among the gendarmerie of the lower valley, the Val di Non; for Jacopo had to repeat his fable more than once, and Angelo thought it prudent not to make inquiries about travellers.  In this valley they were again in summer heat.  Summer splendours robed the broken ground.  The Val di Non lies toward the sun, banked by the Val di Sole, like the southern lizard under a stone.  Chestnut forest and shoulder over shoulder of vineyard, and meadows of marvellous emerald, with here and there central partly-wooded crags, peaked with castle-ruins, and ancestral castles that are still warm homes, and villages dropped among them, and a river bounding and rushing eagerly through the rich enclosure, form the scene, beneath that Italian sun which turns everything to gold.  There is a fair breadth to the vale:  it enjoys a great oval of sky:  the falls of shade are dispersed, dot the hollow range, and are not at noontide a broad curtain passing over from right to left.  The sun reigns and also governs in the Val di Non.

‘The, grape has his full benefit here, padrone,’ said Jacopo.

But the place was too populous, and too much subjected to the general eye, to please Angelo.  At Cles they were compelled to bear an inspection, and a little comedy occurred.  Jacopo, after exhibiting Angelo as his son-in-law, seeing doubts on the soldiers’ faces, mentioned the name of the German suitor for his daughter’s hand—­the carpenter, Johann Spellmann, to whose workshop he requested to be taken.  Johann, being one of the odd Germans in the valley, was well known:  he was carving wood astride a stool, and stopped his whistling to listen to the soldiers, who took the first word out of Jacopo’s mouth, and were convinced, by Johann’s droop of the chin, that the tale had some truth in it; and more when Johann yelled at the Valtelline innkeeper to know why, then, he had come to him, if he was prepared to play him false.  One of the soldiers said bluntly, that as Angelo’s appearance answered to the portrait of a man for whom they were on the lookout, they would, if their countryman liked, take him and give him a dose of marching and imprisonment.

‘Ach! that won’t make my little Rosetta love me better,’ cried Johann, who commenced taking up a string of reproaches against women, and pitched his carving-blade and tools abroad in the wood-dust.