eyes to the sight.  “See,” she said, and her face was set hard with cold and excitement, so that she looked a witch in the uproar; “would you not say the devil is loose now Angelo is abroad?” Thunder and lightning possessed the vale, and then a vertical rain.  At the first gleam of sunlight, Laura and Vittoria walked up to the Laubengasse—­the street of the arcades, where they made purchases of numerous needless articles, not daring to enter the Italian’s shop.  A woman at a fruitstall opposite to it told them that no carriage could have driven up there.  During their great perplexity, mud and rain-stained soldiers, the same whom they had seen borne to earth by the flying curtain, marched before the shop; the shop and the house were searched; the Italian and his old liming wife were carried away.

“Tell me now, that storm was not Angelo’s friend!” Laura muttered.

“Can he have escaped?” said Vittoria.

“He is ‘on horseback.’” Laura quoted the Italian proverb to signify that he had flown; how, she could not say, and none could inform her.  The joy of their hearts rose in one fountain.

“I shall feel better blood in my body from this moment,” Laura said; and Vittoria, “Oh! we can be strong, if we only resolve.”

“You want to sing?”

“I do.”

“I shall find pleasure in your voice now.”

“The wicked voice!”

“Yes, the very wicked voice!  But I shall be glad to hear it.  You can sing to-night, and drown those Lenkensteins.”

“If my Carlo could hear me!”

“Ah!” sighed the signora, musing.  “He is in prison now.  I remember him, the dearest little lad, fencing with my husband for exercise after they had been writing all day.  When Giacomo was imprisoned, Carlo sat outside the prison walls till it was time for him to enter; his chin and upper lip were smooth as a girl’s.  Giacomo said to him, ’May you always have the power of going out, or not have a wife waiting for you.’  Here they come.” (She spoke of tears.) “It’s because I am joyful.  The channel for them has grown so dry that they prick and sting.  Oh, Sandra! it would be pleasant to me if we might both be buried for seven days, and have one long howl of weakness together.  A little bite of satisfaction makes me so tired.  I believe there’s something very bad for us in our always being at war, and never, never gaining ground.  Just one spark of triumph intoxicates us.  Look at all those people pouring out again.  They are the children of fair weather.  I hope the state of their health does not trouble them too much.  Vienna sends consumptive patients here.  If you regard them attentively, you will observe that they have an anxious air.  Their constitutions are not sound; they fear they may die.”

Laura’s irony was unforced; it was no more than a subtle discord naturally struck from the scene by a soul in contrast with it.