imagine why he should attack me," said Standish, as he bared
his arm to be bandaged. "I never saw him before, and I have had no
quarrel with any one. It could not have been robbery, for I was too
near the hotel. I cannot understand it."

"Oh," began old Lenz, "it's easy enough to account for it. He----"

Tina darted one look at her father that went through him as the blade
had gone through the outstretched arm. His mouth closed like a steel
trap.

"Please go for Doctor Zandorf, papa," she said sweetly, and the old man
went. "These Italians," she continued to Standish, "are always
quarrelling. The villain mistook you for some one else in the dusk."

"Ah, that's it, very likely. If the rascal has returned to his senses,
he probably regrets having waked up the wrong passenger."

When the authorities searched for Pietro they found that he had
disappeared as absolutely as though Standish had knocked him through
into China. When he came to himself and rubbed his head, he saw the
blood on the road, and he knew his stroke had gone home somewhere. The
missing knife would be evidence against him, so he thought it safer to
get on the Austrian side of the fence. Thus he vanished over the
Stelvio pass, and found horses to drive on the other side.

The period during which Standish loafed around that lovely garden with
his arm in a sling, waited upon assiduously and tenderly by Tina, will
always be one of the golden remembrances of the Englishman's life. It
was too good to last for ever, and so they were married when it came to
an end. The old man would still have preferred a Swiss innkeeper for a
son-in-law, yet the Englishman was better than the beggarly Italian,
and possibly better than the German who had occupied a place in Tina's
regards before the son of sunny Italy appeared on the scene. That is
one trouble in the continental hotel business; there is such a
bewildering mixture of nationalities.

Standish thought it best not to go back to England at once, as he had
not quite settled to his own satisfaction how the _pension_ was to
be eliminated from the affair and transformed into a palace. He knew a
lovely and elevated castle in the Tyrol near Meran where they accepted
passers-by in an unobtrusive sort of way, and there, he resolved, they
would make their plans. So the old man gave them a great set-out with
which to go over the pass, privately charging the driver to endeavour
to get a return fare from Meran so as to, pa