he acknowledges that he is going to get his deserts.  The faithfulness and purity of Camilla have struck his inner consciousness.  He knows not where she may be.  He has secretly sent messengers in all directions to seek her, and recover her, and obtain her pardon:  in vain.  It is as well, perhaps, that he should never see her more.  Accursed, he has cast off his sweetest friend.  The craven heart could never beat in unison with hers.

’She is in the darkness:  I am in the light.  I am a blot upon the light; she is light in the darkness.’

Montini poured this out with so fine a sentiment that the impatience of the house for sight of its heroine was quieted.  But Irma and Lebruno came forward barely under tolerance.

‘We might as well be thumping a tambourine,’ said Lebruno, during a caress.  Irma bit her underlip with mortification.  Their notes fell flat as bullets against a wall.

This circumstance aroused the ire of Antonio-Pericles against the libretto and revolutionists.  ‘I perceive,’ he said, grinning savagely, ’it has come to be a concert, not an opera; it is a musical harangue in the marketplace.  Illusion goes:  it is politics here!’

Carlo Ammiani was sitting with his mother and Luciano breathlessly awaiting the entrance of Vittoria.  The inner box-door was rudely shaken:  beneath it a slip of paper had been thrust.  He read a warning to him to quit the house instantly.  Luciano and his mother both counselled his departure.  The detestable initials ‘B.  R.,’ and the one word ‘Sbirri,’ revealed who had warned, and what was the danger.  His friend’s advice and the commands of his mother failed to move him.  ’When I have seen her safe; not before,’ he said.

Countess Ammiani addressed Luciano:  ’This is a young man’s love for a woman.’

‘The woman is worth it,’ Luciano replied.

‘No woman is worth the sacrifice of a mother and of a relative.’

‘Dearest countess,’ said Luciano, ’look at the pit; it’s a cauldron.  We shall get him out presently, have no fear:  there will soon be hubbub enough to let Lucifer escape unseen.  If nothing is done to-night, he and I will be off to the Lago di Garda to-morrow morning, and fish and shoot, and talk with Catullus.’

The countess gazed on her son with sorrowful sternness.  His eyes had taken that bright glazed look which is an indication of frozen brain and turbulent heart—­madness that sane men enamoured can be struck by.  She knew there was no appeal to it.

A very dull continuous sound, like that of an angry swarm, or more like a rapid mufed thrumming of wires, was heard.  The audience had caught view of a brown-coated soldier at one of the wings.  The curious Croat had merely gratified a desire to have a glance at the semicircle of crowded heads; he withdrew his own, but not before he had awakened the wild beast in the throng.  Yet a little while and the roar of the beasts would have burst out.  It was thought that Vittoria had been seized or interdicted from appearing.  Conspirators—­the knights of the plains—­meet:  Rudolfos, Romualdos, Arnoldos, and others,—­so that you know Camilla is not idle.  She comes on in the great scene which closes the opera.