veted. He
had only to ask for pardon. Finding it necessary, he came shyly up
to Vittoria, who put Amalia in his way, kissing whom, he was himself
tenderly kissed.

'But girls should not cry!' Vittoria reproved the little woman.

'Why do you cry?' asked Amalia simply.

'See! she has been crying.' Giacomo appropriated the discovery, perforce
of loudness, after the fashion of his sex.

'Why does our Vittoria cry?' both the children clamoured.

'Because your mother is such a cruel sister to her,' said Laura, passing
up to them from the doorway. She drew Vittoria's head against her
breast, looked into her eyes, and sat down among them. Vittoria sang
one low-toned soft song, like the voice of evening, before they were
dismissed to their beds. She could not obey Giacomo's demand for a
martial air, and had to plead that she was tired.

When the children had gone, it was as if a truce had ended. The signora
and Ammiani fell to a brisk counterchange of questions relating to the
mysterious suspicion which had fallen upon Vittoria. Despite Laura's
love for her, she betrayed her invincible feeling that there must be
some grounds for special or temporary distrust.

'The lives that hang on it knock at me here,' she said, touching under
her throat with fingers set like falling arrows.

But Ammiani, who moved in the centre of conspiracies, met at their
councils, and knew their heads, and frequently combated their schemes,
was not possessed by the same profound idea of their potential command
of hidden facts and sovereign wisdom. He said, 'We trust too much to one
man. We are compelled to trust him, but we trust too much to him. I mean
this man, this devil, Barto Rizzo. Signora, signora, he must be spoken
of. He has dislocated the plot. He is the fanatic of the revolution,
and we are trusting him as if he had full sway of reason. What is the
consequence? The Chief is absent he is now, as I believe, in Genoa. All
the plan for the rising is accurate; the instruments are ready, and
we are paralyzed. I have been to three houses to-night, and where, two
hours previously, there was union and concert, all are irresolute and
divided. I have hurried off a messenger to the Chief. Until we hear from
him, nothing can be done. I left Ugo Corte storming against us Milanese,
threatening, as usual, to work without us, and have a Bergamasc and
Brescian Republic of his own. Count Medole is for a week's postponement.
Agostino smiles and chuckles,