tale of the rape of Irma. He rushed to Signora Piaveni's box and
heard it repeated. There he beheld, sitting in the background, an old
English acquaintance, with whom Captain Gambier was conversing.

'My dear Powys, you have come all the way from England to see your
favourite's first night. You will be shocked, sir. She has neglected
her Art. She is exiled, banished, sent away to study and to compose her
mind.'

'I think you are mistaken,' said Laura. 'You will see her almost
immediately.'

'Signora, pardon me; do I not know best?'

'You may have contrived badly.'

Pericles blinked and gnawed his moustache as if it were food for
patience.

'I would wager a milliard of francs,' he muttered. With absolute pathos
he related to Mr. Powys the aberrations of the divinely-gifted voice,
the wreck which Vittoria strove to become, and from which he alone
was striving to rescue her. He used abundant illustrations, coarse and
quaint, and was half hysterical; flashing a white fist and thumping
the long projection of his knee with a wolfish aspect. His grotesque
sincerity was little short of the shedding of tears.

'And your sister, my dear Powys?' he asked, as one returning to the
consideration of shadows.

'My sister accompanies me, but not to the opera.'

'For another campaign--hein?'

'To winter in Italy, at all events.'

Carlo Ammiani entered and embraced Merthyr Powys warmly. The Englishman
was at home among Italians: Pericles, feeling that he was not so, and
regarding them all as a community of fever-patients without hospital,
retired. To his mind it was the vilest treason, the grossest
selfishness, to conspire or to wink at the sacrifice of a voice
like Vittoria's to such a temporal matter as this, which they called
patriotism. He looked on it as one might look on the Hindoo drama of a
Suttee. He saw in it just that stupid action of a whole body of fanatics
combined to precipitate the devotion of a precious thing to extinction.
And worse; for life was common, and women and Hindoo widows were common;
but a Vittorian voice was but one in a generation--in a cycle of
years. The religious belief of the connoisseur extended to the devout
conception that her voice was a spiritual endowment, the casting of
which priceless jewel into the bloody ditch of patriots was far more
tragic and lamentable than any disastrous concourse of dedicated lives.
He shook the lobby with his tread, thinking of the great night this
might h