‘If that’s the case, my Carlo!’ said his friend, and shrugged, and spoke in a very worldly fashion of the fair sex.

Carlo shook him off.  For the rest of the day he was alone, shut up with his journalistic pen.  The pen traversed seas and continents like an old hack to whom his master has thrown the reins.  Apart from the desperate perturbation of his soul, he thought of the Guidascarpi, whom he knew, and was allied to, and of the Lenkensteins, whom he knew likewise, or had known in the days when Giacomo Piaveni lived, and Bianca von Lenkenstein, Laura’s sister, visited among the people of her country.  Countess Anna and Countess Lena von Lenkenstein were the German beauties of Milan, lively little women, and sweet.  Between himself and Countess Lena there had been tender dealings about the age when sweetmeats have lost their attraction, and the charm has to be supplied.  She was rich, passionate for Austria, romantic concerning Italy, a vixen in temper, but with a pearly light about her temples that kept her picture in his memory.  And besides, during those days when women are bountiful to us as Goddesses, give they never so little, she had deigned to fondle hands with him; had set the universe rocking with a visible heave of her bosom; jingled all the keys of mystery; and had once (as to embalm herself in his recollection), once had surrendered her lips to him.  Countess Lena would have espoused Ammiani, believing in her power to make an Austrian out of such Italian material.  The Piaveni revolt had stopped that and all their intercourse by the division of the White Hand, as it was called; otherwise, the hand of the corpse.  Ammiani had known also Count Paul von Lenkenstein.  To his mind, death did not mean much, however pleasant life might be:  his father and his friend had gone to it gaily; and he himself stood ready for the summons:  but the contemplation of a domestic judicial execution, which the Guidascarpi seemed to have done upon Count Paul, affrighted him, and put an end to his temporary capacity for labour.  He felt as if a spent shot were striking on his ribs; it was the unknown sensation of fear.  Changeing, it became pity.  ’Horrible deaths these Austrians die!’ he said.

For a while he regarded their lot as the hardest.  A shaft of sunlight like blazing brass warned him that the day dropped.  He sent to his mother’s stables, and rode at a gallop round Milan, dining alone in one of the common hotel gardens, where he was a stranger.  A man may have good nerve to face the scene which he is certain will be enacted, who shrinks from an hour that is suspended in doubt.  He was aware of the pallor and chill of his looks, and it was no marvel to him when two sbirri in mufti, foreign to Milan, set their eyes on him as they passed by to a vacant table on the farther side of the pattering gold-fish pool, where he sat.  He divined that they might be in pursuit of the Guidascarpi, and alive to read a troubled visage.  ’Yet neither