Her solitude in the villa was beguiled by the arrival of the score of an operatic scena, entitled “Hagar,” by Rocco Ricci, which she fancied that either Carlo or her dear old master had sent, and she devoured it.  She thought it written expressly for her.  With Hagar she communed during the long hours, and sang herself on to the verge of an imagined desert beyond the mountain-shadowed lake and the last view of her beloved Motterone.  Hagar’s face of tears in the Brerawas known to her; and Hagar in her ‘Addio’ gave the living voice to that dumb one.  Vittoria revelled in the delicious vocal misery.  She expanded with the sorrow of poor Hagar, whose tears refreshed her, and parted her from her recent narrowing self-consciousness.  The great green mountain fronted her like a living presence.  Motterone supplied the place of the robust and venerable patriarch, whom she reproached, and worshipped, but with a fathomless burdensome sense of cruel injustice, deeper than the tears or the voice which spoke of it:  a feeling of subjected love that was like a mother’s giving suck to a detested child.  Countess Ammiani saw the abrupt alteration of her step and look with a dim surprise.  “What do you conceal from me?” she asked, and supplied the answer by charitably attributing it to news that the signora Piaveni was coming.

When Laura came, the countess thanked her, saying, “I am a wretched companion for this boiling head.”

Laura soon proved to her that she had been the best, for after very few hours Vittoria was looking like the Hagar on the canvas.

A woman such as Violetta d’Isorella was of the sort from which Laura shrank with all her feminine power of loathing; but she spoke of her with some effort at personal tolerance until she heard of Violetta’s stipulation for the deferring of Carlo’s marriage, and contrived to guess that Carlo was reserved and unfamiliar with his betrothed.  Then she cried out, “Fool that he is!  Is it ever possible to come to the end of the folly of men?  She has inflamed his vanity.  She met him when you were holding him waiting, and no doubt she commenced with lamentations over the country, followed by a sigh, a fixed look, a cheerful air, and the assurance to him that she knew it—­uttered as if through the keyhole of the royal cabinet—­she knew that Sardinia would break the Salasco armistice in a mouth:—­if only, if the king could be sure of support from the youth of Lombardy.”

“Do you suspect the unhappy king?” Vittoria interposed.

“Grasp your colours tight,” said Laura, nodding sarcastic approbation of such fidelity, and smiling slightly.  “There has been no mention of the king.  Countess d’Isorella is a spy and a tool of the Jesuits, taking pay from all parties—­Austria as well, I would swear.  Their object is to paralyze the march on Rome, and she has won Carlo for them.  I am told that Barto Rizzo is another of her conquests.  Thus she has a madman and a fool, and what may not be done with a madman and a fool?  However, I have set a watch on her.  She must have inflamed Carlo’s vanity.  He has it, just as they all have.  There’s trickery:  I would rather behold the boy charging at the head of a column than putting faith in this base creature.  She must have simulated well,” Laura went on talking to herself.