This was the burden of it:

"I am here, and you are absent. Hasten!"




CHAPTER XXXVI

A FRESH ENTANGLEMENT

The Lenkenstein ladies returned to Milan proudly in the path of the army
which they had followed along the city walls on the black March midnight.
The ladies of the Austrian aristocracy generally had to be exiles from
Vienna, and were glad to flock together even in an alien city. Anna and
Lena were aware of Vittoria's residence in Milan, through the interchange
of visits between the Countess of Lenkenstein and her sister Signora
Piaveni. They heard also of Vittoria's prospective and approaching
marriage to Count Ammiani. The Duchess of Graatli, who had forborne a
visit to her unhappy friends, lest her Austrian face should wound their
sensitiveness, was in company with the Lenkensteins one day, when Irma di
Karski called on them. Irma had come from Lago Maggiore, where she had
left her patron, as she was pleased to term Antonio-Pericles. She was
full of chatter of that most worthy man's deplorable experiences of
Vittoria's behaviour to him during the war, and of many things besides.
According to her account, Vittoria had enticed him from place to place
with promises that the next day, and the next day, and the day after, she
would be ready to keep her engagement to go to London, and at last she
had given him the slip and left him to be plucked like a pullet by a
horde of volunteer banditti, out of whose hands Antonio-Pericles-"one of