Ammiani assured her that he would find words of his own for her beauty.

“I hear the eulogy, I know the sonnet,” said Violetta, smiling, and described the points of a brunette:  the thick black banded hair, the full brown eyes, the plastic brows couching over them;—­it was Vittoria’s face:  Violetta was a flower of colour, fair, with but one shade of dark tinting on her brown eye-brows and eye-lashes, as you may see a strip of night-cloud cross the forehead of morning.  She was yellow-haired, almost purple-eyed, so rich was the blue of the pupils.  Vittoria could be sallow in despondency; but this Violetta never failed in plumpness and freshness.  The pencil which had given her aspect the one touch of discord, endowed it with a subtle harmony, like mystery; and Ammiani remembered his having stood once on the Lido of Venice, and eyed the dawn across the Adriatic, and dreamed that Violetta was born of the loveliness and held in her bosom the hopes of morning.  He dreamed of it now, feeling the smooth roll of a torrent.

A cry of “Arms!” rang down the length of the Corso.

He started to his feet thankfully.

“Take me to your mother,” she said.  “I loathe to hear firing and be alone.”

Ammiani threw up the window.  There was a stir of lamps and torches below, and the low sky hung red.  Violetta stood quickly thick-shod and hooded.

“Your mother will admit my companionship, Carlo?”

“She desires to thank you.”

“She has no longer any fear of me?”

“You will find her of one mind with you.”

“Concerning the king!”

“I would say, on most subjects.”

“But that you do not know my mind!  You are modest.  Confess that you are thinking the hour you have passed with me has been wasted.”

“I am, now I hear the call to arms.”

“If I had all the while entertained you with talk of your Vittoria!  It would not have been wasted then, my amaranto.  It is not wasted for me.  If a shot should strike you—­”

“Tell her I died loving her with all my soul!” cried Ammiani.

Violetta’s frame quivered as if he had smitten her.

They left the house.  Countess Ammiani’s door was the length of a barricade distant:  it swung open to them, like all the other house-doors which were, or wished to be esteemed, true to the cause, and hospitable toward patriots.

“Remember, when you need a refuge, my villa is on Lago Maggiore,” Violetta said, and kissed her finger-tips to him.

An hour after, by the light of this unlucky little speech, he thought of her as a shameless coquette.  “When I need a refuge?  Is not Milan in arms?—­Italy alive?  She considers it all a passing epidemic; or, perhaps, she is to plead for me to the king!”

That set him thinking moodily over the things she had uttered of Vittoria’s strange and sudden devotion to the king.