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."

At an inn that they reached toward evening she saw the innkeeper shoot a
little ball of paper at an Italian corporal, who put his foot on it and
picked it up. The soldier subsequently passed through the ranks of his
comrades, gathering winks and grins. They were to have rested at the
inn, but Count Karl was warned by scouts, which was sufficient to make
Pericles cling to him in avoidance of the volunteers, of whom mainly he
was in terror. He looked ague-stricken. He would not listen to her, or
to reason in any shape. "I am on the sea--shall I trust a boat? I stick
to a ship," he said. The soldiers marched till midnight. It was
arranged that the carriage should strike off for Schio at dawn. The
soldiers bivouacked on the slope of one of the low undulations falling to
the Vicentino plain. Vittoria spread her cloak, and lay under bare sky,
not suffering the woman to be ejected from the carriage. Hitherto Luigi
had avoided her. Under pretence of doubling Count Karl's cloak as a
pillow for her head, he whispered, "If the signorina hears shots let her
lie on the ground flat as a sheet." The peacefulness surrounding her
precluded alarm. There was brilliant moonlight, and the host of stars,
all dim; and first they beckoned her up to come away from trouble, and
then, through long gazing, she had the fancy that they bent and swam
about her, making her feel that she lay in the hollows of a warm hushed
sea. She wished for her lover.

Men and officers were lying at a stone's-throw distant. The Tyrolese had
lit a fire for cooking purposes, by which four of them stood, and,
lifting hands, sang one of their mountain songs, that seemed to her to
spring like clear water into air, and fall wavering as a feather falls,