looking on a garden set with mossy statues.  To Odo, however, the scene suggested the most tedious part of his day’s routine.  The compliments to be exchanged, the silly verses to be praised, the gewgaws from Paris to be admired, were all contrasted in his mind with the vision of that other life which had come to him on the hillside of the Superga.  On this mood the Countess Clarice’s sarcasms fell without effect.  To be pouted at because he had failed to attend the promenade of the Valentino was to Odo but a convenient pretext for excusing himself from the Queen’s circle that evening.  He had engaged with little ardour to join Alfieri in what he guessed to be a sufficiently commonplace adventure; but as he listened to the Countess’s chatter about the last minuet-step, and the relative merits of sanspareil water and oil-of-lilies, of gloves from Blois and Vendome, his impatience hailed any alternative as a release.  Meanwhile, however, long hours of servitude intervened.  The lady’s toilet completed, to the adjusting of the last patch, he must attend her to dinner, where, placed at her side, he was awarded the honour of carving the roast; must sit through two hours of biribi in company with the abatino, the doctor, and half-a-dozen parasites of the noble table; and for two hours more must ride in her gilt coach up and down the promenade of the Valentino.

Escaping from this ceremonial, with the consciousness that it must be repeated on the morrow, Odo was seized with that longing for freedom that makes the first street-corner an invitation to flight.  How he envied Alfieri, whose travelling-carriage stood at the beck of such moods!  Odo’s scant means forbade evasion, even had his military duties not kept him in Turin.  He felt himself no more than a puppet dancing to the tune of Parini’s satire, a puny doll condemned, as the strings of custom pulled, to feign the gestures of immortal passions.

2.3.

The night was moonless, with cold dashes of rain, and though the streets of Turin were well-lit no lantern-ray reached the windings of the lane behind the Corpus Domini.

As Odo, alone under the wall of the church, awaited his friend’s arrival, he wondered what risk had constrained the reckless Alfieri to such unwonted caution.  Italy was at that time a vast network of espionage, and the Piedmontese capital passed for one of the best-policed cities in Europe; but even on a moonless night the law distinguished between the noble pleasure-seeker and the obscure delinquent whose fate it was to pay the other’s shot.  Odo knew that he would probably be followed and his movements reported to the authorities; but he was almost equally certain that there would be no active interference in his affairs.  What chiefly puzzled him was Alfieri’s insistence that Cantapresto should not be privy to the adventure.  The soprano had long been the confidant of his pupil’s escapades, and his adroitness had often been of service in intrigues such as that on which Odo now fancied himself engaged.  The place, again, perplexed him:  a sober quarter of convents and private dwellings, in the very eye of the royal palace, scarce seeming the theatre for a light adventure.  These incongruities revived his former wonder; nor was this dispelled by Alfieri’s approach.