watching the roll and spring of the waters, and the radiant foam, while
band-music played to a great company of visitors, and sounds of thunder
drew near. Over the mountains above the Adige, the leaden fingers of an
advance of the thunder-cloud pushed slowly, and on a sudden a mighty gale
sat heaped blank on the mountain-top and blew. Down went the heads of
the poplars, the river staggered in its leap, the vale was shuddering
grey. It was like the transformation in a fairy tale; Beauty had taken
her old cloak about her, and bent to calamity. The poplars streamed
their length sideways, and in the pauses of the strenuous wind nodded
and dashed wildly and white over the dead black water, that waxed in foam
and hissed, showing its teeth like a beast enraged. Laura and Vittoria
joined hands and struggled for shelter. The tent of a travelling circus
from the South, newly-pitched on a grassplot near the river, was caught
up and whirled in the air and flung in the face of a marching guard of
soldiery, whom it swathed and bore sheer to earth, while on them and
around them a line of poplars fell flat, the wind whistling over them.
Laura directed Vittoria's eyes to the sight. "See," she said, and her
face was set hard with cold and excitement, so that she looked a witch in
the uproar; "would you not say the devil is loose now Angelo is abroad?"
Thunder and lightning possessed the vale, and then a vertical rain. At
the first gleam of sunlight, Laura and Vittoria walked up to the
Laubengasse--the street of the arcades, where they made purchases of
numerous needless articles, not daring to enter the Italian's shop.
A woman at a fruitstall opposite to it told them that no carriage could
have driven up there. During their great perplexity, mud and rain-
stained soldiers, the same whom they had seen borne to earth by the
flying curtain, marched before the shop; the shop and the house were
searched; the Italian and his old liming wife were carried away.

"Tell me now, that storm was not Angelo's friend!" Laura muttered.