stretched dead in her chamber.  The brothers kissed her in turn, and sat, one at her head, one at her feet.  At midnight her lover stood among them.  He was gravely saluted, and bidden to look upon the dead body.  Angelo said to him, “Had she lived you should have wedded her hand.  She is gone of her own free choice, and one of us follows her.”  With the sweat of anguish on his forehead, Count Paul drew sword.  The window was barred; six male domestics of the household held high lights in the chamber; the priest knelt beside one corpse, awaiting the other.

Vittoria’s imagination could not go beyond that scene, but she looked out on the brother of the slain youth with great pity, and with a strange curiosity.  The example given by Clelia of the possible love of an Italian girl for the white uniform, set her thinking whether so monstrous a fact could ever be doubled in this world.  “Could it happen to me?” she asked herself, and smiled, as she half-fashioned the words on her lips, “It is a pretty uniform.”

Her reverie was broken by a hiss of “Traitress!” from the woman opposite.

She coloured guiltily, tried to speak, and sat trembling.  A divination of intense hatred had perhaps read the thought within her breast:  or it was a mere outburst of hate.  The woman’s face was like the wearing away of smoke from a spot whence shot has issued.  Vittoria walked for the remainder of the day.  That fearful companion oppressed her.  She felt that one who followed armies should be cast in such a frame, and now desired with all her heart to render full obedience to Carlo, and abide in Brescia, or even in Milan—­a city she thought of shyly.

The march was hurried to the slopes of the Vicentino, for enemies were thick in this district.  Pericles refused to quit the soldiers, though Count Karl used persuasion.  The young nobleman said to Vittoria, “Be on your guard when you meet my sister Anna.  I tell you, we can be as revengeful as any of you:  but you will exonerate me.  I do my duty; I seek to do no more.”

At an inn that they reached toward evening she saw the innkeeper shoot a little ball of paper at an Italian corporal, who put his foot on it and picked it up.  The soldier subsequently passed through the ranks of his comrades, gathering winks and grins.  They were to have rested at the inn, but Count Karl was warned by scouts, which was sufficient to make Pericles cling to him in avoidance of the volunteers, of whom mainly he was in terror.  He looked ague-stricken.  He would not listen to her, or to reason in any shape.  “I am on the sea—­shall I trust a boat?  I stick to a ship,” he said.  The soldiers marched till midnight.  It was arranged that the carriage should strike off for Schio at dawn.  The soldiers bivouacked on the slope of one of the low undulations falling to the Vicentino plain.  Vittoria spread her cloak, and lay under bare sky, not suffering the woman to be ejected from