ery wicked voice! But I shall be glad to hear it. You can sing
to-night, and drown those Lenkensteins."

"If my Carlo could hear me!"

"Ah!" sighed the signora, musing. "He is in prison now. I remember him,
the dearest little lad, fencing with my husband for exercise after they
had been writing all day. When Giacomo was imprisoned, Carlo sat outside
the prison walls till it was time for him to enter; his chin and upper
lip were smooth as a girl's. Giacomo said to him, 'May you always have
the power of going out, or not have a wife waiting for you.' Here they
come." (She spoke of tears.) "It's because I am joyful. The channel for
them has grown so dry that they prick and sting. Oh, Sandra! it would be
pleasant to me if we might both be buried for seven days, and have one
long howl of weakness together. A little bite of satisfaction makes me so
tired. I believe there's something very bad for us in our always being at
war, and never, never gaining ground. Just one spark of triumph
intoxicates us. Look at all those people pouring out again. They are the
children of fair weather. I hope the state of their health does not
trouble them too much. Vienna sends consumptive patients here. If you
regard them attentively, you will observe that they have an anxious air.
Their constitutions are not sound; they fear they may die."

Laura's irony was unforced; it was no more than a subtle discord
naturally struck from the scene by a soul in contrast with it.

They beheld the riding forth of troopers and a knot of officers hotly
conversing together. At another point the duchess and the Lenkenstein
ladies, Count Lenkenstein, Count Serabiglione, and Wilfrid paced up and
down, waiting for music. Laura left the public places and crossed an
upper bridge over the Passeyr, near the castle, by which route she
skirted vines and dropped over sloping meadows to some shaded boulders
where the Passeyr found a sandy bay, and leaped in transparent green, and
whitened and swung twisting in a long smooth body down a narrow chasm,
and noised below. The thundering torrent stilled their sensations: and
the water, making battle against great blocks of porphyry and granite,
caught their thoughts. So strong was the impression of it on Vittoria's
mind, that for hours after, every image she conceived seemed proper to
the inrush and outpour; the elbowing, the tossing, the foaming, the burst
on stones, and silvery bubbles under and silvery canopy above, the
cha