Giacinta read his meaning by signs, and caught her mistress by the sleeve, using force.  She and Major de Pyrmont placed Vittoria, bewildered, in the carriage; De Pyrmont shut the door, and signalled to the coachman.  Vittoria thrust her head out for a last look at her lover, and beheld him with the arms of dark-clothed men upon him.  La Scala was pouring forth its occupants in struggling roaring shoals from every door.  Her outcry returned to her deadened in the rapid rolling of the carriage across the lighted Piazza.  Giacinta had to hold her down with all her might.  Great clamour was for one moment heard by them, and then a rushing voicelessness.  Giacinta screamed to the coachman till she was exhausted.  Vittoria sank shuddering on the lap of her maid, hiding her face that she might plunge out of recollection.

The lightnings shot across her brain, but wrote no legible thing; the scenes of the opera lost their outlines as in a white heat of fire.  She tried to weep, and vainly asked her heart for tears, that this dry dreadful blind misery of mere sensation might be washed out of her, and leave her mind clear to grapple with evil; and then, as the lurid breaks come in a storm-driven night sky, she had the picture of her lover in the hands of enemies, and of Wilfrid in the white uniform; the torment of her living passion, the mockery of her passion by-gone.  Recollection, when it came back, overwhelmed her; she swayed from recollection to oblivion, and was like a caged wild thing.  Giacinta had to be as a mother with her.  The poor trembling girl, who had begun to perceive that the carriage was bearing them to some unknown destination, tore open the bands of her corset and drew her mistress’s head against the full warmth of her bosom, rocked her, and moaned over her, mixing comfort and lamentation in one offering, and so contrived to draw the tears out from her, a storm of tears; not fitfully hysterical, but tears that poured a black veil over the eyeballs, and fell steadily streaming.  Once subdued by the weakness, Vittoria’s nature melted; she shook piteously with weeping; she remembered Laura’s words, and thought of what she had done, in terror and remorse, and tried to ask if the people would be fighting now, but could not.  Laura seemed to stand before her like a Fury stretching her finger at the dear brave men whom she had hurled upon the bayonets and the guns.  It was an unendurable anguish.  Giacinta was compelled to let her cry, and had to reflect upon their present situation unaided.  They had passed the city gates.  Voices on the coachman’s box had given German pass-words.  She would have screamed then had not the carriage seemed to her a sanctuary from such creatures as foreign soldiers, whitecoats; so she cowered on.  They were in the starry open country, on the high-road between the vine-hung mulberry trees.  She held the precious head of her mistress, praying the Saints that strength would soon come to her to talk of their plight, or chatter a little comfortingly at least; and but for the singular sweetness which it shot thrilling to her woman’s heart, she would have been fretted when Vittoria, after one long-drawn wavering sob, turned her lips to the bared warm breast, and put a little kiss upon it, and slept.