, 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
addressed to herself had she dreamed the mischief it might do. Carlo
saw double-dealing in the absence of any mention of the king in his own
letter.

"Quit Turin at once," he dashed hasty lines to Vittoria; "and no
'Viva il Re' till we know what he may merit. Old delusions are