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.