dy.'

Perceiving that there was more in the background, Gambier simply bowed.
He had heard of Italian gentlemen incurring the suspicion of their
fellows by merely being seen in proximity to an Austrian officer.

As they were parting, Carlo said to him, with a very direct meaning in
his eyes, 'Go to the opera tonight.'

'Yes, I suppose so,' the Englishman answered, and digested the look and
the recommendation subsequently.

Lieutenant Pierson had ridden off. The war-machine was in motion from end
to end: the field of flowers was a streaming flood; regiment by regiment,
the crash of bands went by. Outwardly the Italians conducted themselves
with the air of ordinary heedless citizens, in whose bosoms the music set
no hell-broth boiling. Patrician and plebeian, they were chiefly boys;
though here and there a middle-aged workman cast a look of intelligence
upon Carlo and Luciano, when these two passed along the crowd. A gloom of
hoarded hatred was visible in the mass of faces, ready to spring fierily.

Arms were in the city. With hatred to prompt the blow, with arms to
strike, so much dishonour to avenge, we need not wonder that these youths
beheld the bit of liberty in prospect magnified by their mighty
obfuscating ardour, like a lantern in a fog. Reason did not act. They
were in such a state when just to say 'Italia! Italia!' gave them nerve
to match an athlete. So, the parading of Austria, the towering athlete,
failed of its complete lesson of intimidation, and only ruffled the
surface of insurgent hearts. It seemed, and it was, an insult to the
trodden people, who read it as a lesson for cravens: their instinct
commonly hits the bell. They felt that a secure supremacy would not have
paraded itself: so they divined indistinctly that there was weakness
somewhere in the councils of the enemy. When the show had vanished, their
spirits hung pausing, like the hollow air emptied of big sound, and
reacted. Austria had gained little more by her display than the
conscientious satisfaction of the pedagogue who lifts the rod to advise
intending juvenile culprits how richly it can be merited and how poor
will be their future grounds of complaint.

But before Austria herself had been taught a lesson she conceived that
she had but one man and his feeble instruments, and occasional frenzies,
opposed to her, him whom we saw on the Motterone, which was ceasing to be
true; though it was true that the whole popular movement flowed from