He was set upon as soon as he emerged from the gateway; the cavalry cloak was torn from his back, and but for the chance circumstance of his swearing in English, he would have come to harm.  A chill went through his blood on hearing one of his assailants speak the name of Barto Rizzo.  The English oath stopped an arm that flashed a dagger half its length.  Wilfrid obeyed a command to declare his name, his country, and his rank.  It’s not the prince! it’s not the Hungarian!” went many whispers; and he was drawn away by a man who requested him to deliver his reasons for entering the palace, and who appeared satisfied by Wilfrid’s ready mixture of invention and fact.  But the cloak!  Wilfrid stated boldly that the cloak was taken by him from the Duchess of Graatli’s at Como; that he had seen a tall Hussar officer slip it off his shoulders; that he had wanted a cloak, and had appropriated it.  He had entered the gate of the palace because of a woman’s hand that plucked at the skirts of this very cloak.

“I saw you enter,” said the man; “do that no more.  We will not have the blood of Italy contaminated—­do you hear?  While that half-Austrian Medole is tip-toeing ’twixt Milan and Turin, we watch over his honour, to set an example to our women and your officers.  You have outwitted us to-night.  Off with you!”

Wilfrid was twirled and pushed through the crowd till he got free of them.  He understood very well that they were magnanimous rascals who could let an accomplice go, though they would have driven steel into the principal.

Nothing came of this adventure for some time.  Wilfrid’s reflections (apart from the horrible hard truth of Vittoria’s marriage, against which he dashed his heart perpetually, almost asking for anguish) had leisure to examine the singularity of his feeling a commencement of pride in the clasping of his musket;—­he who on the first day of his degradation had planned schemes to stick the bayonet-point between his breast-bones:  he thought as well of the queer woman’s way in Countess Medole’s adjuration to him that he should never love a married woman;—­in her speaking, as it seemed, on his behalf, when it was but an outcry of her own acute wound.  Did he love a married woman?  He wanted to see one married woman for the last time; to throw a frightful look on her; to be sublime in scorn of her; perhaps to love her all the better for the cruel pain, in the expectation of being consoled.  While doing duty as a military machine, these were the pictures in his mind; and so well did his routine drudgery enable him to bear them, that when he heard from General Schoneck that the term of his degradation was to continue in Italy, and from his sister that General Pierson refused to speak of him or hear of him until he had regained his gold shoulder-strap, he revolted her with an ejaculation of gladness, and swore brutally that he desired to have no advancement; nothing but sleep and drill; and, he added conscientiously,