Purgatory? Ah, what did she care for their purgatory now! To count one year of love fulfilled with Will, she would gladly give her poor body to be burnt in burning hell for ever and ever. It was the Church that intervened to prevent it, not she; for herself, she was Will’s; she could live for him, she could die for him, she could lose her own soul for him. She never said a word to Cousin Fridolin and his wife, or to the people of St Valentin, of her relations with Andreas. Still, the villagers guessed them all. Simple villagers know more of the world than we reckon. She was rich, she was grand, they said, since she’d married the _Wirth_, and become a great lady: but she wasn’t happy with Herr Andreas; he was cold and unkind to her. Those marks on her little wrists—they were surely the impress of Herr Andreas’s big fingers; those red eyes, that pale face—they were surely the result of Herr Andreas’s infidelities. Money, after all, isn’t everything in this world: Lina Telser had diamonds and pearls at command, and she drank fine red wine, specially brought from Innsbruck; but she would have been happier, people thought at St Valentin in the Zillerthal, if she’d married Cousin Fridolin, or even Franz Lindner! CHAPTER XLVII SEEMINGLY UNCONNECTED Franz Lindner! And how was Franz Lindner engaged during these stormy days? He was working out by degrees his own scheme in life for making himself rich, and so, as he thought, acceptable to Linnet. With great difficulty, partly by saving and hoarding with Tyrolese frugality, partly by rare good luck in following a fortunate tip for last autumn’s Cesarewitch, Franz had scraped together at last the five hundred pounds which he required for working his “system” at Monte Carlo. The royal road to wealth now lay open before him. So he started blithely from Victoria one bright spring morning, bound southward straight through by the _rapide_ to Nice, with his heart on fire, and his capital in good Bank of England notes in his pocket. He meant to stop at Nice, not at Monte Carlo itself, because he was advised that living was cheaper in the larger town; and Franz, being a Tyroler, reflected with prudence that even when one’s going to win twenty thousand pounds, it’s best to be careful in the matter of expenditure till one’s sure one’s got them.