re the night of the
fifteenth; I want my strength too much. I shall have to hear a misery
from them; I know it, I feel it; it turns my blood. But let me hear their
voices! England is half my country, though I am so willing to forget her
and give all my life to Italy. Stay with me, dear friend, my best father!
humour me, for you know that I am always charming when I am humoured."

Agostino pressed his finger on a dimple in her cheeks. "You can afford to
make such a confession as that to a greybeard. The day is your own. Bear
in mind that you are so situated that it will be prudent for you to have
no fresh relations, either with foreigners or others, until your work is
done,--in which, my dear child, may God bless you!"

"I pray to him with all my might," Vittoria said in reply.

After a consultation with Agostino, Ugo Corte and Marco and Giulio bade
their adieux to her. The task of keeping Luigi from their clutches was
difficult; but Agostino helped her in that also. To assure them, after
his fashion, of the harmlessness of Luigi, he seconded him in a contest
of wit against Beppo, and the little fellow, now that he had shaken off
his fears, displayed a quickness of retort and a liveliness "unknown to
professional spies and impossible to the race," said Agostino; "so
absolutely is the mind of man blunted by Austrian gold. We know that for
a fact. Beppo is no match for him. Beppo is sententious; ponderously
illustrative; he can't turn; he is long-winded; he, I am afraid, my
Carlo, studies the journals. He has got your journalistic style, wherein
words of six syllables form the relief to words of eight, and hardly one
dares to stand by itself. They are like huge boulders across a brook. The
meaning, do you, see, would run of itself, but you give us these
impedimenting big stones to help us over it, while we profess to
understand you by implication. For my part, I own, that to me, your
parliamentary, illegitimate academic, modern crocodile phraseology, which
is formidable in the jaws, impenetrable on the back, can't circumvent a
corner, and is enabled to enter a common understanding solely by having a
special highway prepared for it,--in short, the writing in your journals
is too much for me. Beppo here is an example that the style is useless
for controversy. This Luigi baffles him at every step."

"Some," rejoined Carlo, "say that Beppo has had the virtue to make you
his study."

Agostino threw himself on his back and c