‘Cat, begone!’ said Vittoria, promptly setting him down on his feet, and little Amalia at the same time perceiving that practical sympathy only required a ring at the bell for it to come out, straightway pulled the wires within herself, and emitted a doleful wail that gave her sole possession of Vittoria’s bosom, where she was allowed to bring her tears to an end very comfortingly.  Giacomo meanwhile, his body bent in an arch, plucked at Carlo Ammiani’s wrists with savagely playful tugs, and took a stout boy’s lesson in the art of despising what he coveted.  He had only to ask for pardon.  Finding it necessary, he came shyly up to Vittoria, who put Amalia in his way, kissing whom, he was himself tenderly kissed.

‘But girls should not cry!’ Vittoria reproved the little woman.

‘Why do you cry?’ asked Amalia simply.

‘See! she has been crying.’  Giacomo appropriated the discovery, perforce of loudness, after the fashion of his sex.

‘Why does our Vittoria cry?’ both the children clamoured.

‘Because your mother is such a cruel sister to her,’ said Laura, passing up to them from the doorway.  She drew Vittoria’s head against her breast, looked into her eyes, and sat down among them.  Vittoria sang one low-toned soft song, like the voice of evening, before they were dismissed to their beds.  She could not obey Giacomo’s demand for a martial air, and had to plead that she was tired.

When the children had gone, it was as if a truce had ended.  The signora and Ammiani fell to a brisk counterchange of questions relating to the mysterious suspicion which had fallen upon Vittoria.  Despite Laura’s love for her, she betrayed her invincible feeling that there must be some grounds for special or temporary distrust.

‘The lives that hang on it knock at me here,’ she said, touching under her throat with fingers set like falling arrows.

But Ammiani, who moved in the centre of conspiracies, met at their councils, and knew their heads, and frequently combated their schemes, was not possessed by the same profound idea of their potential command of hidden facts and sovereign wisdom.  He said, ’We trust too much to one man.  We are compelled to trust him, but we trust too much to him.  I mean this man, this devil, Barto Rizzo.  Signora, signora, he must be spoken of.  He has dislocated the plot.  He is the fanatic of the revolution, and we are trusting him as if he had full sway of reason.  What is the consequence?  The Chief is absent he is now, as I believe, in Genoa.  All the plan for the rising is accurate; the instruments are ready, and we are paralyzed.  I have been to three houses to-night, and where, two hours previously, there was union and concert, all are irresolute and divided.  I have hurried off a messenger to the Chief.  Until we hear from him, nothing can be done.  I left Ugo Corte storming against us Milanese, threatening, as usual, to work without us, and have a Bergamasc and Brescian Republic of his own.  Count Medole is for a week’s postponement.  Agostino smiles and chuckles, and talks his poetisms.’