’The signorina takes none of his warnings, nor do we.  She escaped a plot last night, and to-night she sings.’

‘She must not,’ said Agostino imperiously.

‘She does.’

‘I must stop that.’  Agostino jumped out of bed.

The young men beset him with entreaties to leave the option to her.

‘Fools!’ he cried, plunging a rageing leg into his garments.  ’Here, Iris!  Mercury! fly to Jupiter and say we are all old men and boys in Italy, and are ready to accept a few middleaged mortals as Gods, if they will come and help us.  Young fools!  Do you know that when you conspire you are in harness, and yoke-fellows, every one?’

‘Yoked to that Barto Rizzo!’

’Yes; and the worse horse of the two.  Listen, you pair of Nuremberg puppet-heads!  If the Chief were here, I would lie still in my bed.  Medole has stopped the outbreak.  Right or wrong, he moves a mass; we are subordinates—­particles.  The Chief can’t be everywhere.  Milan is too hot for him.  Two men are here, concealed—­Rinaldo and Angelo Guidascarpi.  The rumour springs from that.  They have slain Count Paul Lenkenstein, and rushed to old Milan for work, with the blood on their swords.  Oh, the tragedy!—­when I have time to write it.  Let me now go to my girl, to my daughter!  The blood of the Lenkenstein must rust on the steel.  Angelo slew him:  Rinaldo gave him the cross to kiss.  You shall have the whole story by-and-by; but this will be a lesson to Germans not to court our Italian damsels.  Lift not that curtain, you Pannonian burglars!  Much do we pardon; but bow and viol meet not, save that they be of one wood; especially not when signor bow is from yonderside the Rhoetian Alps, and donzella Viol is a growth of warm Lombardy.  Witness to it, Angelo and Rinaldo Guidascarpi! bravo!  You boys there—­you stand like two Tyrolese salad-spoons!  I say that my girl, my daughter, shall never help to fire blank shot.  I sent my paternal commands to her yesterday evening.  Does the wanton disobey her father and look up to a pair of rocket-headed rascals like you?  Apes! if she sings that song to-night, the ear of Italy will be deaf to her for ever after.  There’s no engine to stir to-night; all the locks are on it; she will send half-a-dozen milkings like you to perdition, and there will be a circle of black blood about her name in the traditions of the insurrection—­do you hear?  Have I cherished her for that purpose? to have her dedicated to a brawl!’

Agostino fumed up and down the room in a confusion of apparel, savouring his epithets and imaginative peeps while he stormed, to get a relish out of something, as beseems the poetic temperament.  The youths were silenced by him; Carlo gladly.

‘Troop!’ said the old man, affecting to contrast his attire with theirs; ’two graces and a satyr never yet went together, and we’ll not frighten the classic Government of Milan.  I go out alone.  No, Signor Luciano, I am not sworn to Count Medole.  I see your sneer contain it.  Ah! what a thing is hurry to a mind like mine.  It tears up the trees by the roots, floods the land, darkens utterly my poor quiet universe.  I was composing a pastoral when you came in.  Observe what you have done with my “Lovely Age of Gold!"’