a little in advance of him.  Breakfasting there, he enjoyed the first truly calm cigar of many days.  Gendarmes whom he had met near the place came in at his heels.  They said that the party would positively be arrested, or not allowed to cross the Monte Pallade.  The passes to Meran and Botzen, and the road to Trent, were strictly guarded.  Weisspriess hurried them forward with particular orders that they should take into custody the whole of the party, excepting the lady; her, if arrested with the others, they were to release:  her maid and the three men were to be marched back to Cles, and there kept fast.

The game was now his own:  he surveyed its pretty intricate moves as on a map.  The character of Herr Johannes he entirely discarded:  an Imperial officer in his uniform, sword in belt, could scarcely continue that meek performance.  ’But I may admire music, and entreat her to give me a particular note, if she has it,’ said the captain, hanging in contemplation over a coming scene, like a quivering hawk about to close its wings.  His heart beat thick; which astonished him:  hitherto it had never made that sort of movement.

From Cles he despatched a letter to the fair chatelaine at Meran, telling her that by dainty and skilful management of the paces, he was bringing on the intractable heroine of the Fifteenth, and was to be expected in about two or three days.  The letter was entrusted to Wilhelm, who took the borrowed horse back to Trent.

Weisspriess was on the mule-track a mile above the last village ascending to the pass, when he observed the party of prisoners, and climbed up into covert.  As they went by he discerned but one person in female garments; the necessity to crouch for obscurity prevented him from examining them separately.  He counted three men and beheld one of them between gendarmes.  ‘That must be my villain,’ he said.

It was clear that Vittoria had chosen to go forward alone.  The captain praised her spirit, and now pushed ahead with hunter’s strides.  He passed an inn, closed and tenantless:  behind him lay the Val di Non; in front the darker valley of the Adige:  where was the prey?  A storm of rage set in upon him with the fear that he had been befooled.  He lit a cigar, to assume ease of aspect, whatever the circumstances might be, and gain some inward serenity by the outer reflection of it—­not altogether without success.  ‘My lady must be a doughty walker,’ he thought; ’at this rate she will be in the Ultenthal before sunset.’  A wooded height ranged on his left as he descended rapidly.  Coming to a roll of grass dotted with grey rock, he climbed it, and mounting one of the boulders, beheld at a distance of half-a-dozen stone-throws downward, the figure of a woman holding her hand cup-shape to a wayside fall of water.  The path by which she was going rounded the height he stood on.  He sprang over the rocks, catching up his clattering steel scabbard; and plunging through tinted leafage and green underwood, steadied his heels on a sloping bank, and came down on the path with stones and earth and brambles, in time to appear as a seated pedestrian when Vittoria turned the bend of the mountain way.