--you look
kind."

Pericles accompanied him into a caffe, the picture of an enamoured happy
man. He waived aside contemptuously all mention of Vittoria's having
enemies. She had them when, as a virgin, she had no sense. As a woman,
she had none, for she now had sense. Had she not brought her husband to
be sensible, so that they moved together in Milanese society, instead
of stupidly fighting at Rome? so that what he could not take to
himself--the marvellous voice--he let bless the multitude! "She is the
Beethoven of singers," Pericles concluded. Wilfrid thought so on the
night when she sang to succour the Lombard widows. It was at a concert,
richly thronged; ostentatiously thronged with Austrian uniforms.
He fancied that he could not bear to look on her. He left the house
thinking that to hear her and see her and feel that she was one upon the
earth, made life less of a burden.

This evening was rendered remarkable by a man's calling out, "You are a
traitress!" while Vittoria stood before the seats. She became pale, and
her eyelids closed. No thinness was subsequently heard in her voice.
The man was caught as he strove to burst through the crowd at the
entrance-door, and proved to be a petty bookseller of Milan, by name
Sarpo, known as an orderly citizen. When taken he was inflamed with
liquor. Next day the man was handed from the civil to the military
authorities, he having confessed to the existence of a plot in the city.
Pericles came fuming to Wilfrid's quarters. Wilfrid gathered from him
that Sarpo's general confession had been retracted: it was too foolish
to snare the credulity of Austrian officials. Sarpo stated that he had
fabricated the story of a plot, in order to escape the persecutions of a
terrible man, and find safety in prison lodgings vender Government. The
short confinement for a civic offence was not his idea of safety; he
desired to be sheltered by Austrian soldiers and a fortress, and said
that his torments were insupportable while Barto Rizzo was at large.
This infamous Republican had latterly been living in his house, eating
his bread, and threatening death to him unless he obeyed every command.
Sarpo had undertaken his last mission for the purpose of supplying his
lack of resolution to release himself from his horrible servitude by any
other means; not from personal animosity toward the Countess Alessandra
Ammiani, known as la Vittoria. When seized, fear had urged him to
escape. Such was his se