Carlo hesitated; he longed to hear those ladies talk of Vittoria.  ’Do they speak French?’

’Oh, dear, yes.  That is, as we luckless English people speak it.  Perhaps you will more easily pardon their seminary Italian.  See there,’ Captain Gambier pointed at some trotting squadrons; ’these Austrians have certainly a matchless cavalry.  The artillery seems good.  The infantry are fine men—­very fine men.  They have a “woodeny” movement; but that’s in the nature of the case:  tremendous discipline alone gives homogeneity to all those nationalities.  Somehow they get beaten.  I doubt whether anything will beat their cavalry.’

‘They are useless in street-fighting,’ said Carlo.

‘Oh, street-fighting!’ Captain Gambier vented a soldier’s disgust at the notion.  ‘They’re not in Paris.  Will you step forward?’

Just then the tall Greek approached the party of English.  The introduction was delayed.

He was addressed by the fair lady, in the island tongue, as ’Mr. Pericles.’  She thanked him for his extreme condescension in deigning to notice them.  But whatever his condescension had been, it did not extend to an admitted acquaintance with the poor speech of the land of fogs.  An exhibition of aching deafness was presented to her so resolutely, that at last she faltered, ’What! have you forgotten English, Mr. Pericles?  You spoke it the other day.’

‘It is ze language of necessity—­of commerce,’ he replied.

’But, surely, Mr. Pericles, you dare not presume to tell me you choose to be ignorant of it whenever you please?’

‘I do not take grits into ze teeth, madame; no more.’  ’But you speak it perfectly.’

’Perfect it may be, for ze transactions of commerce.  I wish to keep my teez.’

‘Alas!’ said the lady, compelled, ‘I must endeavour to swim in French.’

‘At your service, madame,’ quoth the Greek, with an immediate doubling of the length of his body.

Carlo heard little more than he knew; but the confirmation of what we know will sometimes instigate us like fresh intelligence, and the lover’s heart was quick to apprehend far more than he knew in one direction.  He divined instantaneously that the English-Austrian spoken of by Barto Rizzo was the officer sitting on horseback within half-a-dozen yards of him.  The certainty of the thought cramped his muscles.  For the rest, it became clear to him that the attempt of the millionaire connoisseur to carry off Vittoria had received the tacit sanction of the Austrian authorities; for reasons quite explicable, Mr. Pericles, as the English lady called him, distinctly hinted it, while affirming with vehement self-laudation that his scheme had succeeded for the vindication of Art.

‘The opera you will hear zis night,’ he said, ’will be hissed.  You will hear a chorus of screech-owls to each song of that poor Irma, whom the Italian people call “crabapple.”  Well; she pleases German ears, and if they can support her, it is well.  But la Vittoria—­your Belloni—­you will not hear; and why?  She has been false to her Art, false!  She has become a little devil in politics.  It is a Guy Fawkes femelle!  She has been guilty of the immense crime of ingratitude.  She is dismissed to study, to penitence, and to the society of her old friends, if they will visit her.’