One night she surprised Count Paul Lenkenstein at Clelia’s window.  Rinaldo was in the garden below.  He moved to the shadow of a cypress, and was seen moving by the old nurse.  The lover took the single kiss he had come for, was led through the chamber, and passed unchallenged into the street.  Clelia sat between locked doors and darkened windows, feeling colder to the brothers she had been reared with than to all other men upon the earth.  They sent for her after a lapse of hours.  Her old nurse was kneeling at their feet.  Rinaldo asked for the name of her lover.  She answered with it.  Angelo said, “It will be better for you to die:  but if you cannot do so easy a thing as that, prepare widow’s garments.”  They forced her to write three words to Count Paul, calling him to her window at midnight.  Rinaldo fetched a priest:  Angelo laid out two swords.  An hour before the midnight, Clelia’s old nurse raised the house with her cries.  Clelia was 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.”