“It is deplorable.  You must have an army.  The Piedmontese once over the Ticino, how can you act in opposition to it?  You must learn to take a master.  The king is only, or he appears, tricksy because you compel him to wind and counterplot.  I swear to you, Italy is his foremost thought.  The Star of Italy sits on the Cross of Savoy.”

Ammiani kept his eyelids modestly down.  “Ten thousand to plead for him, such as you!” he said.  “But there is only one!”

“If you had been headstrong once upon a time, and I had been weak, you see, my Carlo, you would have been a domestic tyrant, I a rebel.  You will not admit the existence of a virtue in an opposite opinion.  Wise was your mother when she said ‘No’ to a wilful boy!”

Violetta lit her cigarette and puffed the smoke lightly.

“I told you in that horrid dungeon, my Carlo Amaranto—­I call you by the old name—­the old name is sweet!—­I told you that your Vittoria is enamoured of the king.  She blushes like a battle-flag for the king.  I have heard her ‘Viva il Re!’ It was musical.”

“So I should have thought.”

“Ay, but my amaranto-innamorato, does it not foretell strife?  Would you ever—­ever take a heart with a king’s head stamped on it into your arms?”

“Give me the chance!”

He was guilty of this ardent piece of innocence though Violetta had pitched her voice in the key significant of a secret thing belonging to two memories that had not always flowed dividedly.

“Like a common coin?” she resumed.

“A heart with a king’s head stamped on it like a common coin.”

He recollected the sentence.  He had once, during the heat of his grief for Giacomo Piaveni, cast it in her teeth.

Violetta repeated it, as to herself, tonelessly; a method of making an old unkindness strike back on its author with effect.

“Did we part good friends?  I forget,” she broke the silence.

“We meet, and we will be the best of friends,” said Ammiani.

“Tell your mother I am not three years older than her son,—­I am thirty.  Who will make me young again?  Tell her, my Carlo, that the genius for intrigue, of which she accuses me, develops at a surprising rate.  As regards my beauty,” the countess put a tooth of pearl on her soft under lip.

Ammiani assured her that he would find words of his own for her beauty.

“I hear the eulogy, I know the sonnet,” said Violetta, smiling, and described the points of a brunette:  the thick black banded hair, the full brown eyes, the plastic brows couching over them;—­it was Vittoria’s face:  Violetta was a flower of colour, fair, with but one shade of dark tinting on her brown eye-brows and eye-lashes, as you may see a strip of night-cloud cross the forehead of morning.  She was yellow-haired, almost purple-eyed, so rich was the blue of the pupils.  Vittoria could be sallow in despondency; but this Violetta never failed in plumpness and freshness.  The pencil which had given her aspect the one touch of discord, endowed it with a subtle harmony, like mystery; and Ammiani remembered his having stood once on the Lido of Venice, and eyed the dawn across the Adriatic, and dreamed that Violetta was born of the loveliness and held in her bosom the hopes of morning.  He dreamed of it now, feeling the smooth roll of a torrent.