er whether
haply she might be the person in the pay of Revolutionists who was about
to appear at La Scala, under the name of the Signorina Vittoria. 'For you
are getting dramatic in your pose, my Laura,' he added, familiarizing the
colder tone of his irony. 'You are beginning to stand easily in attitudes
of defiance to your own father.'

'That I may practise how to provoke a paternal Government, you mean,' she
rejoined, and was quite a match for him in dialectics.

The count chanced to allude further to the Signorina Vittoria.

'Do you know much of that lady?' she asked.

'As much as is known,' said he.

They looked at one another; the count thinking, 'I gave to this girl an
excess of brains, in my folly!'

Compelled to drop his eyes, and vexed by the tacit defeat, he pursued,
'You expect great things from her?'

'Great,' said his daughter.

'Well, well,' he murmured acquiescingly, while sounding within himself
for the part to play. 'Well-yes! she may do what you expect.'

'There is not the slightest doubt of her capacity,' said his daughter, in
a tone of such perfect conviction that the count was immediately and
irresistibly tempted to play the part of sagacious, kindly, tolerant but
foreseeing father; and in this becoming character he exposed the risks
her party ran in trusting anything of weight to a woman. Not that he
decried women. Out of their sphere he did not trust them, and he simply
objected to them when out of their sphere: the last four words being
uttered staccato.

'But we trust her to do what she has undertaken to do,' said Laura.

The count brightened prodigiously from his suspicion to a certainty; and
as he was still smiling at the egregious trap his clever but unskilled
daughter had fallen into, he found himself listening incredulously to her
plain additional sentence:--'She has easy command of three octaves.'

By which the allusion was transformed from politics to Art. Had Laura
reserved this cunning turn a little further, yielding to the natural
temptation to increase the shock of the antithetical battery, she would
have betrayed herself: but it came at the right moment: the count gave up
his arms. He told her that this Signorina Vittoria was suspected. 'Whom
will they not suspect!' interjected Laura. He assured her that if a
conspiracy had ripened it must fail. She was to believe that he abhorred
the part of a spy or informer, but he was bound, since she was reckless,
to watch over his