“You must make excuses for popular fury in times like these,” the stranger observed.

The Austrian nobleman asked him stiffly for his name.  The name of Count Ammiani was given.  “I think you know it,” Carlo added.

“You escaped from your lawful imprisonment this day, did you not?—­you and your cousin, the assassin.  I talk of law!  I might as justly talk of honour.  Who lives here?” Carlo contained himself to answer, “The present occupant is, I believe, if I have hit the house I was seeking, the Countess d’Isorella.”

“My family were placed here, sir?” Count Lenkenstein inquired of Wilfrid.  But Wilfrid’s attention was frozen by the sight of Vittoria’s lover.  A wifely call of “Adalbert” from above quieted the count’s anxiety.

“Countess d’Isorella,” he said.  “I know that woman.  She belongs to the secret cabinet of Carlo Alberto—­a woman with three edges.  Did she not visit you in prison two weeks ago?  I speak to you, Count Ammiani.  She applied to the Archduke and the Marshal for permission to visit you.  It was accorded.  To the devil with our days of benignity!  She was from Turin.  The shuffle has made her my hostess for the nonce.  I will go to her.  You, sir,” the count turned to Wilfrid—­“you will stay below.  Are you in the pay of the insurgents?”

Wilfrid, the weakest of human beings where women were involved with him, did one of the hardest things which can task a young man’s fortitude:  he looked his superior in the face, and neither blenched, nor frowned, nor spoke.

Ammiani spoke for him.  “There is no pay given in our ranks.”

“The licence to rob is supposed to be an equivalent,” said the count.

Countess d’Isorella herself came downstairs, with profuse apologies for the absence of all her male domestics, and many delicate dimples about her mouth in uttering them.  Her look at Ammiani struck Wilfrid as having a peculiar burden either of meaning or of passion in it.  The count grimaced angrily when he heard that his sister Lena was not yet able to bear the fatigue of a walk to the citadel.  “I fear you must all be my guests, for an hour at least,” said the countess.

Wilfrid was left pacing the hall.  He thought he had never beheld so splendid a person, or one so subjugatingly gracious.  Her speech and manner poured oil on the uncivil Austrian nobleman.  What perchance had stricken Lena?

He guessed; and guessed it rightly.  A folded scrap of paper signed by the Countess of Lenkenstein was brought to him.

It said:—­“Are you making common cause with the rebels?  Reply.  One asks who should be told.”

He wrote:—­“I am an outcast of the army.  I fight as a volunteer with the K. K. troops.  Could I abandon them in their peril?”

The touch of sentiment he appended for Lena’s comfort.  He was too strongly impressed by the new vision of beauty in the house for his imagination to be flushed by the romantic posture of his devotion to a trailing flag.