“You mistrust them?” I exclaimed.  “They whose souls have been tried in the furnace, who have the temper of fine steel, pliant as gold, but incorruptible as adamant,—­heroes and saints, they stand so low in your favor?  Come, then, come with me now,—­for the bells have struck the hour, and shadows clothe the earth,—­come to their conclave where discovery is death, and judge if they be idle prattlers, or men who carry their lives in their hands!”

Fool!  Fool!  Fool!  Every sound in the air cries out that word to me:  the bee that wings across the tower hums it in my ear; the booming alarm-bell rings it forth; my heart, my failing heart, beats it while I speak.  I would have carried a snake to the sacred ibis-nest, and thenceforth hope was hollow as an egg-shell!

She ran from the room, but, pausing in the door-way, exclaimed,—­

“Remember, if you take me there, that I am no Roman patriot,—­I!  I, who am of the House of Austria, that House that wears the crown of the Caesars, those Caesars who swayed the very imperial sceptre, who trailed the very imperial purple of old Rome!  I endure the cause because it is yours.  I beseech you to be faithful to it; because I should despise you, if for any woman you swerved from an object that had previously been with you holier than heaven!”

I stood there leaning from the lofty window, and looking down over the wide, solitary fields.  Recollections crowded upon me, hopes rose before me.  One day, that yet lives in my heart, Anselmo, sprang up afresh, a day forever domed in memory.  Fair rose the sun that day, and I walked on the nation’s errands through the streets of a distant town,—­a hoar and antique place, that sheltered me safely, so slight guard was it thought to need by our oppressors!  It pleased that reverend arch-hypocrite to take at this hour his airing.  Late events had given the people courage.  It was a market-day, peasants from the country obstructed the ancient streets, the citizens were all abroad.  Not few were the maledictions muttered over a column of French infantry that wound along as it returned to Rome from some movement of subjection, not low the curses showered on an officer who escorted ladies upon their drive.  As I went, I considered what a day it would have been for emeute, and what mortal injury emeute would have done our cause.  Italy, we said, like fools, but honest fools, must not be redeemed with blood.  As if there were ever any sacred pact, any new order of things, that was not first sealed by blood!  Therefore, when I, alone perhaps of all the throng, saw one man—­a man in whose soul I knew the iron rankled—­stealing behind the crowd, behind the monuments, and, as the coach of His Excellency rolled luxuriously along, levelling a glittering barrel,—­it was but an instant’s work to seize the advancing creatures, to hold them rearing,—­and then a deadly flash,—­while the ball whistled past me, grazed my hand, and pierced the leader’s heart.