when her artistic pre-eminence and the sovereign fulness and fire of her singing struck a note of grateful remembered delight.  This is what the great voice does for us.  It rarely astonishes our ears.  It illumines our souls, as you see the lightning make the unintelligible craving darkness leap into long mountain ridges, and twisting vales, and spires of cities, and inner recesses of light within light, rose-like, toward a central core of violet heat.

At the rising of the curtain the knights of the plains, Rudolfo, Romualdo, Arnoldo, and others, who were conspiring to overthrow Count Orso at the time when Camillo’s folly ruined all, assemble to deplore Camilla’s banishment, and show, bereft of her, their helplessness and indecision.  They utter contempt of Camillo, who is this day to be Pontifically divorced from his wife to espouse the detested Michiella.  His taste is not admired.

They pass off.  Camillo appears.  He is, as he knows, little better than a pensioner in Count Orso’s household.  He holds his lands on sufferance.  His faculties are paralyzed.  He is on the first smooth shoulder-slope of the cataract.  He knows that not only was his jealousy of his wife groundless, but it was forced by a spleenful pride.  What is there to do?  Nothing, save resignedly to prepare for his divorce from the conspiratrix Camilla and espousals with Michiella.  The cup is bitter, and his song is mournful.  He does the rarest thing a man will do in such a predicament—­he acknowledges that he is going to get his deserts.  The faithfulness and purity of Camilla have struck his inner consciousness.  He knows not where she may be.  He has secretly sent messengers in all directions to seek her, and recover her, and obtain her pardon:  in vain.  It is as well, perhaps, that he should never see her more.  Accursed, he has cast off his sweetest friend.  The craven heart could never beat in unison with hers.

’She is in the darkness:  I am in the light.  I am a blot upon the light; she is light in the darkness.’

Montini poured this out with so fine a sentiment that the impatience of the house for sight of its heroine was quieted.  But Irma and Lebruno came forward barely under tolerance.

‘We might as well be thumping a tambourine,’ said Lebruno, during a caress.  Irma bit her underlip with mortification.  Their notes fell flat as bullets against a wall.

This circumstance aroused the ire of Antonio-Pericles against the libretto and revolutionists.  ‘I perceive,’ he said, grinning savagely, ’it has come to be a concert, not an opera; it is a musical harangue in the marketplace.  Illusion goes:  it is politics here!’

Carlo Ammiani was sitting with his mother and Luciano breathlessly awaiting the entrance of Vittoria.  The inner box-door was rudely shaken:  beneath it a slip of paper had been thrust.  He read a warning to him to quit the house instantly.  Luciano and his mother both counselled his departure.  The detestable initials ‘B.  R.,’ and the one word ‘Sbirri,’ revealed who had warned, and what was the danger.  His friend’s advice and the commands of his mother failed to move him.  ’When I have seen her safe; not before,’ he said.