‘I desire that all rejoice this day.’

‘My hour of rejoicing approaches.’

‘Wilt thou unveil?’

‘Dost thou ask to look the storm in the face?’

‘Wilt thou unveil?’

‘Art thou hungry for the lightning?’

‘I bid thee unveil, woman!’

Michiella’s ringing shriek of command produces no response.

‘It is she!’ cries Michiella, from a contracted bosom; smiting it with clenched hands.

’Swift to the signatures.  O rival! what bitterness hast thou come hither to taste.’

Camilla sings aside:  ‘If yet my husband loves me and is true.’

Count Orso exclaims:  ’Let trumpets sound for the commencement of the festivities.  The lord of his country may slumber while his people dance and drink!’

Trumpets flourish.  Witnesses are called about the table.  Camillo, pen in hand, prepares for the supreme act.  Leonardo at one wing watches the eagerness of Michiella.  The chorus chants to a muted measure of suspense, while Camillo dips pen in ink.

’She is away from me:  she scorns me:  she is lost to me.  Life without honour is the life of swine.  Union without love is the yoke of savage beasts.  O me miserable!  Can the heavens themselves plumb the depth of my degradation?’

Count Orso permits a half-tone of paternal severity to point his kindly hint that time is passing.  When he was young, he says, in the broad and benevolently frisky manner, he would have signed ere the eye of the maiden twinkled her affirmative, or the goose had shed its quill.

Camillo still trifles.  Then he dashes the pen to earth.

’Never!  I have but one wife.  Our marriage is irrevocable.  The dishonoured man is the everlasting outcast.  What are earthly possessions to me, if within myself shame faces me?  Let all go.  Though I have lost Camilla, I will be worthy of her.  Not a pen no pen; it is the sword that I must write with.  Strike, O count!  I am here:  I stand alone.  By the edge of this sword, I swear that never deed of mine shall rob Camilla of her heritage; though I die the death, she shall not weep for a craven!’

The multitude break away from Camilla—­veiled no more, but radiant; fresh as a star that issues through corrupting vapours, and with her voice at a starry pitch in its clear ascendency: 

’Tear up the insufferable scroll!—­
O thou, my lover and my soul! 
It is the Sword that reunites;
The Pen that our perdition writes.’

She is folded in her husband’s arms.

Michiella fronts them, horrid of aspect:—­

’Accurst divorced one! dost thou dare
To lie in shameless fondness there? 
Abandoned! on thy lying brow
Thy name shall be imprinted now.’

Camilla parts from her husband’s embrace: 

’My name is one I do not fear;
’Tis one that thou wouldst shrink to hear. 
Go, cool thy penitential fires,
Thou creature, foul with base desires!’