Pericles shrugged.  ’The Gods, my dear General, decree.  I did my best to lay a case before them; that is all.’

’Ah, well!  I am of opinion you will not lay many other cases before the Gods who rule in Milan.’

‘I have helped them to a good opera.’

‘Are you aware that this opera consists entirely of political allusions?’

General Pierson spoke offensively, as the urbane Austrian military permitted themselves to do upon occasion when addressing the conquered or civilians.

‘To me,’ returned Pericles, ‘an opera—­it is music.  I know no more.’

‘You are responsible for it,’ said the General, harshly.  ’It was taken upon trust from you.’

‘Brutal Austrians!’ Pericles murmured.  ’And you do not think much of her voice, General?’

‘Pretty fair, sir.’

‘What wonder she does not care to open her throat to these swine!’ thought the changed Greek.

Vittoria’s door was shut to Agostino.  No voice within gave answer.  He tried the lock of the door, and departed.  She sat in a stupor.  It was harder for her to make a second appearance than it was to make the first, when the shameful suspicion cruelly attached to her had helped to balance her steps with rebellious pride; and more, the great collected wave of her ambitious years of girlhood had cast her forward to the spot, as in a last effort for consummation.  Now that she had won the public voice (love, her heart called it) her eyes looked inward; she meditated upon what she had to do, and coughed nervously.  She frightened herself with her coughing, and shivered at the prospect of again going forward in the great nakedness of stagelights and thirsting eyes.  And, moreover, she was not strengthened by the character of the music and the poetry of the second Act:—­a knowledge of its somewhat inferior quality may possibly have been at the root of Agostino’s dread of an anticlimax.  The seconda donna had the chief part in it—­notably an aria (Rocco had given it to her in compassion) that suited Irma’s pure shrieks and the tragic skeleton she could be.  Vittoria knew how low she was sinking when she found her soul in the shallows of a sort of jealousy of Irma.  For a little space she lost all intimacy with herself; she looked at her face in the glass and swallowed water, thinking that she had strained a dream and confused her brain with it.  The silence of her solitary room coming upon the blaze of light the colour and clamour of the house, and the strange remembrance of the recent impersonation of an ideal character, smote her with the sense of her having fallen from a mighty eminence, and that she lay in the dust.  All those incense-breathing flowers heaped on her table seemed poisonous, and reproached her as a delusion.  She sat crouching alone till her tirewomen called; horrible talkative things! her own familiar maid Giacinta being the worst to bear with.