“Tell me now, that storm was not Angelo’s friend!” Laura muttered.

“Can he have escaped?” said Vittoria.

“He is ‘on horseback.’” Laura quoted the Italian proverb to signify that he had flown; how, she could not say, and none could inform her.  The joy of their hearts rose in one fountain.

“I shall feel better blood in my body from this moment,” Laura said; and Vittoria, “Oh! we can be strong, if we only resolve.”

“You want to sing?”

“I do.”

“I shall find pleasure in your voice now.”

“The wicked voice!”

“Yes, the very wicked voice!  But I shall be glad to hear it.  You can sing to-night, and drown those Lenkensteins.”

“If my Carlo could hear me!”

“Ah!” sighed the signora, musing.  “He is in prison now.  I remember him, the dearest little lad, fencing with my husband for exercise after they had been writing all day.  When Giacomo was imprisoned, Carlo sat outside the prison walls till it was time for him to enter; his chin and upper lip were smooth as a girl’s.  Giacomo said to him, ’May you always have the power of going out, or not have a wife waiting for you.’  Here they come.” (She spoke of tears.) “It’s because I am joyful.  The channel for them has grown so dry that they prick and sting.  Oh, Sandra! it would be pleasant to me if we might both be buried for seven days, and have one long howl of weakness together.  A little bite of satisfaction makes me so tired.  I believe there’s something very bad for us in our always being at war, and never, never gaining ground.  Just one spark of triumph intoxicates us.  Look at all those people pouring out again.  They are the children of fair weather.  I hope the state of their health does not trouble them too much.  Vienna sends consumptive patients here.  If you regard them attentively, you will observe that they have an anxious air.  Their constitutions are not sound; they fear they may die.”

Laura’s irony was unforced; it was no more than a subtle discord naturally struck from the scene by a soul in contrast with it.

They beheld the riding forth of troopers and a knot of officers hotly conversing together.  At another point the duchess and the Lenkenstein ladies, Count Lenkenstein, Count Serabiglione, and Wilfrid paced up and down, waiting for music.  Laura left the public places and crossed an upper bridge over the Passeyr, near the castle, by which route she skirted vines and dropped over sloping meadows to some shaded boulders where the Passeyr found a sandy bay, and leaped in transparent green, and whitened and swung twisting in a long smooth body down a narrow chasm, and noised below.  The thundering torrent stilled their sensations:  and the water, making battle against great blocks of porphyry and granite, caught their thoughts.  So strong was the impression of it on Vittoria’s mind, that for hours after, every image she conceived seemed proper to the inrush and outpour; the elbowing, the tossing, the foaming, the burst on stones, and silvery bubbles under and silvery canopy above, the chattering and huzzaing; all working on to the one-toned fall beneath the rainbow on the castle-rock.