not allow advantage to be taken of even the treacherous simulation of chivalry, and only permitted firing after he had returned to his men.  “I was hit here and here,” said Marco, touching his wounds, as men can hardly avoid doing when speaking of the fresh wound.  Merthyr got him on his feet, put money in his pocket, and led him off the big stones painfully.  “They give no quarter,” Marco assured him, and reasoned that it must be so, for they had not taken him prisoner, though they saw him fall, and ran by or in view of him in pursuit of Carlo.  By this Merthyr was convinced that Weisspriess meant well.  He left his guide in charge of Marco to help him into the Engadine.  Greatly to his astonishment, Lorenzo tossed the back of his hand at the offer of money.  “There shall be this difference between me and my wife,” he remarked; “and besides, gracious signore, serving my countrymen for nothing, that’s for love, and the Tedeschi can’t punish me for it, so it’s one way of cheating them, the wolves!” Merthyr shook his hand and said, “Instead of my servant, be my friend;” and Lorenzo made no feeble mouth, but answered, “Signore, it is much to my honour,” and so they went different ways.

Left to himself Merthyr set step vigorously upward.  Information from herdsmen told him that he was an hour off the foot of one of the passes.  He begged them to tell any hunted men who might come within hail that a friend ran seeking them.  Farther up, while thinking of the fine nature of that Lorenzo, and the many men like him who could not by the very existence of nobility in their bosoms suffer their country to go through another generation of servitude, his heart bounded immensely, for he heard a shout and his name, and he beheld two figures on a rock near the gorge where the mountain opened to its heights.  But they were not Carlo and Angelo.  They were Wilfrid and Count Karl, the latter of whom had discerned him through a telescope.  They had good news to revive him, however:  good at least in the main.  Nagen had captured Carlo and Angelo, they believed; but they had left Weisspriess near on Nagen’s detachment, and they furnished sound military reasons to show why, if Weisspriess favoured the escape, they should not be present.  They supposed that they were not half-a-mile from the scene in the pass where Nagen was being forcibly deposed from his authority:  Merthyr borrowed Count Karl’s glass, and went as they directed him round a bluff of the descending hills, that faced the vale, much like a blown and beaten sea-cliff.  Wilfrid and Karl were so certain of Count Ammiani’s safety, that their only thought was to get under good cover before nightfall, and haply into good quarters, where the three proper requirements of the soldier-meat, wine, and tobacco—­might be furnished to them.  After an imperative caution that they should not present themselves before the Countess Alessandra, Merthyr sped quickly over the broken ground.  How gaily the two young men cheered