Vittoria wrote respectfully to Countess Ammiani stating why she declined to leave Turin.  The letter was poorly worded.  While writing it she had been taken by a sentiment of guilt and of isolation in presuming to disobey her lover.  “I am glad he will not see it,” she remarked to Laura, who looked rapidly across the lines, and said nothing.  Praise of the king was in the last sentence.  Laura’s eyes lingered on it half-a-minute.

“Has he not drawn his sword?  He is going to march,” said Vittoria.

“Oh, yes,” Laura replied coolly; “but you put that to please Countess Ammiani.”

Vittoria confessed she had not written it purposely to defend the king.  “What harm?” she asked.

“None.  Only this playing with shades allows men to call us hypocrites.”

The observation angered Vittoria.  She had seen the king of late; she had breathed Turin incense and its atmosphere; much that could be pleaded on the king’s behalf she had listened to with the sympathetic pity which can be woman’s best judgement, and is the sentiment of reason.  She had also brooded over the king’s character, and had thought that if the Chief could have her opportunities for studying this little impressible, yet strangely impulsive royal nature, his severe condemnation of him would be tempered.  In fact, she was doing what makes a woman excessively tender and opinionated; she was petting her idea of the misunderstood one:  she was thinking that she divined the king’s character by mystical intuition; I will dare to say, maternally apprehended it.  And it was a character strangely open to feminine perceptions, while to masculine comprehension it remained a dead blank, done either in black or in white.

Vittoria insisted on praising the king to Laura.

“With all my heart,” Laura said, “so long as he is true to Italy.”

“How, then, am I hypocritical?”

“My Sandra, you are certainly perverse.  You admitted that you did something for the sake of pleasing Countess Ammiani.”

“I did.  But to be hypocritical one must be false.”

“Oh!” went Laura.

“And I write to Carlo.  He does not care for the king; therefore it is needless for me to name the king to him; and I shall not.”

Laura said, “Very well.”  She saw a little deeper than the perversity, though she did not see the springs.  In Vittoria’s letter to her lover, she made no allusion to the Sword of Italy.

Countess Ammiani forwarded both letters on to Brescia.

When Carlo had finished reading them, he heard all Brescia clamouring indignantly at the king for having disarmed volunteers on Lago Maggiore and elsewhere in his dominions.  Milan was sending word by every post of the overbearing arrogance of the Piedmontese officers and officials, who claimed a prostrate submission from a city fresh with the ardour of the glory it had won for itself, and that would fain have welcomed