"Padrone, has my man passed this way?"
He had, to Morton's eye, rather the easy manner of a well-bred American, than the more distant bearing common with an English gentleman.
"Eccellenza, si," replied the padrone,—"he passed a quarter of an hour ago, with the birds your excellency has shot."
The young man rode on, passing Morton, as he stood by the roadside.
"I have seen that face before," said the latter to himself—"in a dream, for what I know, but I have seen it."
It was a frank and open face, manly, yet full of kindliness, not without a tinge of melancholy.
"Come of it what will," thought the fugitive, "I will speak to him."
He walked after the retiring horseman, and when an angle of the road concealed him from the inn, quickened his pace almost to a run. But at that moment the Englishman struck into a sharp trot, and disappeared over the ridge of a hill. Morton soon gained sight of him again, and kept him in view for about a mile, when he saw him enter the gateway belonging to a small villa, between the road and the water. It was a very pretty spot; the grounds terraced to the edge of the lake; with laurels, cypresses, box hedges, a fountain or two, an artificial grotto, and a superb diorama of water and mountains.
Morton stood waiting at the gate. At length he saw a female domestic, evidently Italian, passing through the shrubbery before the house, and disappearing behind it. In a few minutes more, a solemn personage appeared at the door, whom he would have known at a mile's distance for an old English servant. He stood looking with great gravity out upon the grounds. Morton approached, and accosting him in Italian, asked to see his master.
John was not a proficient in the tongue of Ariosto and Dante. Indeed, in his intercourse with the natives, he had seen occasion for one phrase alone, and that a somewhat pithy and repellant one,—Andate al diavolo.