ier or to Lugano, and I should not be satisfied to spend
ten minutes with you. Ask Ismaele to get you to Lugano in some
way on the morning of the twenty-fifth of this month. Leave
Lugano in time to reach Magadino at one o'clock, for you cannot
go by way of Luino. At Magadino you must take the boat that
leaves at about half-past one. At four or thereabouts you will
reach Isola Bella, where I shall arrive at about the same hour
from Arona. At this time of year Isola Bella is a desert. We
can spend the evening together, and in the morning you will
leave for Oria, I for Turin.

"I am writing to Uncle Piero to ask his forgiveness for
depriving him of your company for one day.

"I do not apprehend any danger. The Austrians are thinking only
of their arms, and their police are letting thousands of young
men escape them, young men who come here to take up arms. The
Austrians would be terrible the day after a victory, but, God
willing! that day shall never dawn for them.

"Luisa, can it be possible I shall not find you at Isola Bella,
that you may think you are pleasing Maria by not coming? But
don't you know that if some one had said to my Maria, to my
poor little darling--run and say good-bye to your papa, who is
perhaps going away to die--how fast----"

The reader's voice trembled, broke, and was lost in a sob. Luisa hid her
face in her hands. He placed the letter on her knees, saying with
difficulty: "Donna Luisa, can you hesitate?"

"I am wicked," Luisa murmured. "I am mad!"

"But do you not love him?"

"Sometimes I think I love him very much, at other times not at all."

"My God!" the professor exclaimed. "But now? Are you not moved by the
thought that you may never see him again?"

Luisa was silent, she seemed to be crying. Suddenly she started to her
feet, pressing her hands to her temples, and fixed her eyes on the
professor's face, eyes in which there were no tears, but in which there
shone a sinister and angry light. "You don't know," she cried, "what
there is here in my head! What a mass of contradictions, how many
opposite thoughts that are struggling together, and always changing
places with each other! When I received the letter I cried bitterly, and
said to myself. 'Yes, my poor Franco, this time I will go!'--And then
there came a voice that spoke here in my forehead, and said: 'No, you
must not go