ad seen the king of late; she had
breathed Turin incense and its atmosphere; much that could be pleaded on
the king's behalf she had listened to with the sympathetic pity which can
be woman's best judgement, and is the sentiment of reason. She had also
brooded over the king's character, and had thought that if the Chief
could have her opportunities for studying this little impressible, yet
strangely impulsive royal nature, his severe condemnation of him would be
tempered. In fact, she was doing what makes a woman excessively tender
and opinionated; she was petting her idea of the misunderstood one: she
was thinking that she divined the king's character by mystical intuition;
I will dare to say, maternally apprehended it. And it was a character
strangely open to feminine perceptions, while to masculine comprehension
it remained a dead blank, done either in black or in white.

Vittoria insisted on praising the king to Laura.

"With all my heart," Laura said, "so long as he is true to Italy."

"How, then, am I hypocritical?"

"My Sandra, you are certainly perverse. You admitted that you did
something for the sake of pleasing Countess Ammiani."

"I did. But to be hypocritical one must be false."

"Oh!" went Laura.

"And I write to Carlo. He does not care for the king; therefore it is
needless for me to name the king to him; and I shall not."

Laura said, "Very well." She saw a little deeper than the perversity,
though she did not see the springs. In Vittoria's letter to her lover,
she made no allusion to the Sword of Italy.

Countess Ammiani forwarded both letters on to Brescia.

When Carlo had finished reading them, he heard all Brescia clamouring
indignantly at the king for having disarmed volunteers on Lago Maggiore
and elsewhere in his dominions. Milan was sending word by every post of
the overbearing arrogance of the Piedmontese officers and officials, who
claimed a prostrate submission from a city fresh with the ardour of the
glory it had won for itself, and that would fain have welcomed them as
brothers. Romara and others wrote of downright visible betrayal. It was a
time of passions;--great readiness for generosity, equal promptitude for
undiscriminating hatred. Carlo read Vittoria's praise of the king with
insufferable anguish. "You--you part of me, can write like this!" he
struck the paper vehemently. The fury of action transformed the gentle
youth. Countess Ammiani would not have forwarded the letter ad