She rejoined coldly, ‘I am not thinking of her.’

Vittoria had tried to utter what might be a word of comfort for him, and she found she had not a thought or an emotion.  Here she differed from Laura, who, if the mood to heal a favourite’s little sore at any season came upon her, would shower out lively tendernesses and all cajoleries possible to the tongue of woman.  Yet the irritation of action narrowed Laura more than it did Vittoria; fevered her and distracted her sympathies.  Being herself a plaything at the time, she could easily play a part for others.  Vittoria had not grown, probably never would grow, to be so plastic off the stage.  She was stringing her hand to strike a blow as men strike, and women when they do that cannot be quite feminine.

‘How dull the streets are,’ she remarked.

‘They are, just now,’ said Ammiani, thinking of them on the night to come convulsed with strife, and of her, tossed perhaps like a weed along the torrent of bloody deluge waters.  Her step was so firm, her face so assured, that he could not fancy she realized any prospect of the sort, and it filled him with pity and a wretched quailing.

If I speak now I shall be talking like a coward, he said to himself:  and he was happily too prudent to talk to her in that strain.  So he said nothing of peace and safety.  She was almost at liberty to believe that he approved the wisdom of her resolution.  At the maestro’s door she thanked him for his escort, and begged for it further within an hour.  ‘And do bring me some chocolate.’  She struck her teeth together champing in a pretty hunger for it.  ’I have no chocolate in my pocket, and I hardly know myself.’

‘What will your Signor Antonio say?’

Vittoria filliped her fingers.  ’His rule is over, and he is my slave:  I am not his.  I will not eat much; but some some I must have.’

Ammiani laughed and promised to obtain it.  ’That is, if there’s any to be had.’

‘Break open doors to get it for me,’ she said, stamping with fun to inspirit him.

No sooner was she standing alone, than her elbow was gently plucked at on the other side:  a voice was sibilating:  ‘S-s-signorina.’  She allowed herself to be drawn out of the light of the open doorway, having no suspicion and no fear.  ‘Signorina, here is chocolate.’  She beheld two hands in cup-shape, surcharged with packets of Turin chocolate.

‘Lugi, it is you?’

The Motterone spy screwed his eyelids to an expression of the shrewdest secresy.

’Hist! signorina.  Take some.  You shall have all, but wait:—­by-and-by.  Aha! you look at my eyes as you did on the Monterone, because one of them takes the shoulder-view; but, the truth is, my father was a contrabandist, and had his eye in his ear when the frontier guard sent a bullet through his back, cotton-bags and cutleries, and all!  I inherit from him, and have been wry-eyed ever since.  How does that touch a man’s