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.

Gracefully withdrawing the cigar from his mouth, and touching his breast with turned-in fingers, he accosted her with a comical operatic effort at her high notes

‘Italia!’

She gathered her arms on her bosom and looked swiftly round:  then at the apparition of her enemy.

It is but an ironical form of respect that you offer to the prey you have been hotly chasing and have caught.  Weisspriess conceived that he had good reasons for addressing her in the tone best suited to his character:  he spoke with a ridiculous mincing suavity: 

’My pretty sweet! are you not tired?  We have not seen one another for days!  Can you have forgotten the enthusiastic Herr Johannes?  You have been in pleasant company, no doubt; but I have been all—­all alone.  Think of that!  What an exceedingly fortunate chance this is!  I was smoking dolefully, and imagining anything but such a rapture.—­No, no, mademoiselle, be