“Oh, that, like our Dante, I had lived in the days when souls were damned!  Then would I uplift another shout, believe me!  As things go now, we must allow the traitor to hope for his own future, and we simply shrug.  We cannot plant him neck-deep for everlasting in a burning marl, and hear him howling.  We have no weapons in these times—­none!  Our curses come back to roost.  This is one of the serious facts of the century, and controls violent language.  What! are you all gathered about me?  Oracles must be moving, too.  There’s no rest even for them, when they have got a mountain to scale.”

A cry, “He is there!” and “Do you see him?” burst from the throats of men surrounding Agostino.

Looking up to the mountain’s top, they had perceived the figure of one who stood with folded arms, sufficiently near for the person of an expected friend to be descried.  They waved their hats, and Carlo shot ahead.  The others trod after him more deliberately, but in glad excitement, speculating on the time which this sixth member of the party, who were engaged to assemble at a certain hour of the morning upon yonder height, had taken to reach the spot from Omegna, or Orta, or Pella, and rejoicing that his health should be so stout in despite of his wasting labours under city smoke.

“Yes, health!” said Agostino.  “Is it health, do you think?  It’s the heart of the man! and a heart with a mill-stone about it—­a heart to breed a country from!  There stands the man who has faith in Italy, though she has been lying like a corpse for centuries.  God bless him!  He has no other comfort.  Viva l’Italia!”

The exclamation went up, and was acknowledged by him on the eminence overhanging them; but at a repetition of it his hand smote the air sideways.  They understood the motion, and were silent; while he, until Carlo breathed his name in his hearing, eyed the great scene stedfastly, with the absorbing simple passion of one who has endured long exile, and finds his clustered visions of it confronting the strange, beloved, visible life:—­the lake in the arms of giant mountains:  the far-spreading hazy plain; the hanging forests; the pointed crags; the gleam of the distant rose-shadowed snows that stretch for ever like an airy host, mystically clad, and baffling the eye as with the motions of a flight toward the underlying purple land.

CHAPTER II

He was a man of middle stature, thin, and even frail, as he stood defined against the sky; with the complexion of the student, and the student’s aspect.  The attentive droop of his shoulders and head, the straining of the buttoned coat across his chest, the air as of one who waited and listened, which distinguished his figure, detracted from the promise of other than contemplative energy, until his eyes were fairly seen and felt.  That is, until the observer became aware that those soft and large dark meditative eyes