‘Are you an Austrian?’ she exclaimed, and Carlo felt that she was shrinking back.

’I am the Wilfrid Pole whom you knew.  You are entrusted to my charge; I have sworn to conduct you to the doors in safety, whatever it may cost me.’

Vittoria looked at him mournfully.  Her eyes filled with tears.  ’The night is spoiled for me!’ she murmured.

‘Emilia!’

‘That is not my name.’

’I know you by no other.  Have mercy on me.  I would do anything in the world to serve you.’

Major de Pyrmont came up to him and touched his arm.  He said briefly:  ’We shall have a collision, to a certainty, unless the people hear from one of her set that she is out of the house.’

Wilfrid requested her to confide her hand to him.

‘My hand is engaged,’ she said.

Bowing ceremoniously, Wilfrid passed on, and Vittoria, with Carlo and Luciano and her maid Giacinta, followed between files of bayonets through the dusky passages, and downstairs into the night air.

Vittoria spoke in Carlo’s ear:  ’I have been unkind to him.  I had a great affection for him in England.’

‘Thank him; thank him,’ said Carlo.

She quitted her lover’s side and went up to Wilfrid with a shyly extended hand.  A carriage was drawn up by the kerbstone; the doors of it were open.  She had barely made a word intelligible; when Major de Pyrmont pointed to some officers approaching.  ’Get her out of the way while there’s time,’ he said in French to Luciano.  ’This is her carriage.  Swiftly, gentlemen, or she’s lost.’

Giacinta read his meaning by signs, and caught her mistress by the sleeve, using force.  She and Major de Pyrmont placed Vittoria, bewildered, in the carriage; De Pyrmont shut the door, and signalled to the coachman.  Vittoria thrust her head out for a last look at her lover, and beheld him with the arms of dark-clothed men upon him.  La Scala was pouring forth its occupants in struggling roaring shoals from every door.  Her outcry returned to her deadened in the rapid rolling of the carriage across the lighted Piazza.  Giacinta had to hold her down with all her might.  Great clamour was for one moment heard by them, and then a rushing voicelessness.  Giacinta screamed to the coachman till she was exhausted.  Vittoria sank shuddering on the lap of her maid, hiding her face that she might plunge out of recollection.

The lightnings shot across her brain, but wrote no legible thing; the scenes of the opera lost their outlines as in a white heat of fire.  She tried to weep, and vainly asked her heart for tears, that this dry dreadful blind misery of mere sensation might be washed out of her, and leave her mind clear to grapple with evil; and then, as the lurid breaks come in a storm-driven night sky, she had the picture of her lover in the hands of enemies, and of Wilfrid in the white uniform; the torment of her living passion, the mockery of her passion by-gone.  Recollection,