is ear.

Agostino then called him his good Spartan boy for keeping brave
countenance. 'Wait till you comprehend women philosophically. All's
trouble with them till then. At La Scala tonight, my sons! We have
rehearsed the fiasco; the Tedeschi perform it. Off with you, that I may
go out alone!'

He seemed to think it an indubitable matter that he would find Vittoria
and bend her will.

Agostino had betrayed his weakness to the young men, who read him with
the keen eyes of a particular disapprobation. He delighted in the dark
web of intrigue, and believed himself to be no ordinary weaver of that
sunless work. It captured his imagination, filling his pride with a
mounting gas. Thus he had become allied to Medole on the one hand, and to
Barto Rizzo on the other. The young men read him shrewdly, but speaking
was useless.

Before Carlo parted from Luciano, he told him the burden of the whisper,
which had confirmed what he had heard on the Piazzi d'Armi. It was this:
Barto Rizzo, aware that Lieutenant Pierson was the bearer of despatches
from the Archduke in Milan to the marshal, then in Verona, had followed,
and by extraordinary effort reached Verona in advance; had there tricked
and waylaid him, and obtained, instead of despatches, a letter of recent
date, addressed to him by Vittoria, which compromised the insurrectionary
project.

'If that's the case, my Carlo!' said his friend, and shrugged, and spoke
in a very worldly fashion of the fair sex.

Carlo shook him off. For the rest of the day he was alone, shut up with
his journalistic pen. The pen traversed seas and continents like an old
hack to whom his master has thrown the reins. Apart from the desperate
perturbation of his soul, he thought of the Guidascarpi, whom he knew,
and was allied to, and of the Lenkensteins, whom he knew likewise, or had
known in the days when Giacomo Piaveni lived, and Bianca von Lenkenstein,
Laura's sister, visited among the people of her country. Countess Anna
and Countess Lena von Lenkenstein were the German beauties of Milan,
lively little women, and sweet. Between himself and Countess Lena there
had been tender dealings about the age when sweetmeats have lost their
attraction, and the charm has to be supplied. She was rich, passionate
for Austria, romantic concerning Italy, a vixen in temper, but with a
pearly light about her temples that kept her picture in his memory. And
besides, during those days when women are bountiful to us a