The official part of his visit being terminated, the colonel addressed some questions to the duchess concerning the night of the famous Fifteenth at La Scala.  He was an amateur, and spoke with enthusiasm of the reports of the new prima donna.  The duchess perceived that he was asking for an introduction to the heroine of the night, and graciously said that perhaps that very prima donna would make amends, to him for his absence on the occasion.  Vittoria checked a movement of revolt in her frame.  She cast an involuntary look at Wilfrid.  “Now it begins,” she thought, and went to the piano:  she had previously refused to sing.  Wilfrid had to bend his head over his betrothed and listen to her whisperings.  He did so, carelessly swaying his hand to the measure of the aria, with an increasing bitter comparison of the two voices.  Lena persisted in talking; she was indignant at his abandonment of the journey to Venice; she reproached him as feeble, inconsiderate, indifferent.  Then for an instant she would pause to hear the voice, and renew her assault.  “We ought to be thankful that she is not singing a song of death and destruction to us!  The archduchess is coming to Venice.  If you are presented to her and please her, and get the writs of naturalization prepared, you will be one of us completely, and your fortune is made.  If you stay here—­why should you stay?  It is nothing but your uncle’s caprice.  I am too angry to care for music.  If you stay, you will earn my contempt.  I will not be buried another week in such a place.  I am tired of weeping.  We all go to Venice:  Captain Weisspriess follows us.  We are to have endless Balls, an opera, a Court there—­with whom am I to dance, pray, when I am out of mourning?  Am I to sit and govern my feet under a chair, and gaze like an imbecile nun?  It is too preposterous.  I am betrothed to you; I wish, I wish to behave like a betrothed.  The archduchess herself will laugh to see me chained to a chair.  I shall have to reply a thousand times to ‘Where is he?’ What can I answer?  ‘Wouldn’t come,’ will be the only true reply.”

During this tirade, Vittoria was singing one of her old songs, well known to Wilfrid, which brought the vision of a foaming weir, and moonlight between the branches of a great cedar-tree, and the lost love of his heart sitting by his side in the noising stillness.  He was sure that she could be singing it for no one but for him.  The leap taken by his spirit from this time to that, was shorter than from the past back to the present.

“You do not applaud,” said Lena, when the song had ceased.

He murmured:  “I never do, in drawing-rooms.”

“A cantatrice expects it everywhere; these creatures live on it.”

“I’ll tell her, if you like, what we thought of it, when I take her down to my sister, presently.”

“Are you not to take me down?”

“The etiquette is to hand her up to you.”