Pericles accompanied him into a caffe, the picture of an enamoured happy man.  He waived aside contemptuously all mention of Vittoria’s having enemies.  She had them when, as a virgin, she had no sense.  As a woman, she had none, for she now had sense.  Had she not brought her husband to be sensible, so that they moved together in Milanese society, instead of stupidly fighting at Rome? so that what he could not take to himself—­the marvellous voice—­he let bless the multitude!  “She is the Beethoven of singers,” Pericles concluded.  Wilfrid thought so on the night when she sang to succour the Lombard widows.  It was at a concert, richly thronged; ostentatiously thronged with Austrian uniforms.  He fancied that he could not bear to look on her.  He left the house thinking that to hear her and see her and feel that she was one upon the earth, made life less of a burden.

This evening was rendered remarkable by a man’s calling out, “You are a traitress!” while Vittoria stood before the seats.  She became pale, and her eyelids closed.  No thinness was subsequently heard in her voice.  The man was caught as he strove to burst through the crowd at the entrance-door, and proved to be a petty bookseller of Milan, by name Sarpo, known as an orderly citizen.  When taken he was inflamed with liquor.  Next day the man was handed from the civil to the military authorities, he having confessed to the existence of a plot in the city.  Pericles came fuming to Wilfrid’s quarters.  Wilfrid gathered from him that Sarpo’s general confession had been retracted:  it was too foolish to snare the credulity of Austrian officials.  Sarpo stated that he had fabricated the story of a plot, in order to escape the persecutions of a terrible man, and find safety in prison lodgings vender Government.  The short confinement for a civic offence was not his idea of safety; he desired to be sheltered by Austrian soldiers and a fortress, and said that his torments were insupportable while Barto Rizzo was at large.  This infamous Republican had latterly been living in his house, eating his bread, and threatening death to him unless he obeyed every command.  Sarpo had undertaken his last mission for the purpose of supplying his lack of resolution to release himself from his horrible servitude by any other means; not from personal animosity toward the Countess Alessandra Ammiani, known as la Vittoria.  When seized, fear had urged him to escape.  Such was his second story.  The points seemed irreconcilable to those who were not in the habit of taking human nature into their calculations of a possible course of conduct; even Wilfrid, though he was aware that Barto Rizzo hated Vittoria inveterately, imagined Sarpo’s first lie to have necessarily fathered a second.  But the second story was true:  and the something like lover’s wrath with which the outrage to Vittoria fired Pericles, prompted him to act on it as truth.  He told Wilfrid that he should summon