“I will not excuse my own deeds; perhaps I cannot.  We Italians are in a hurricane; I cannot reflect.  It may be that I do not act more thinkingly than a wild beast.”

“You have spoken it,” Anna exclaimed.

“Countess Lena, he fights in your ranks as a common soldier.  He encounters more than a common soldier’s risks.”

“The man is brave,—­we knew that,” said Anna.

“He is more than brave, he is devoted.  He fights against us, without hope of reward from you.  Have I utterly ruined him?”

“I imagine that you may regard it as a fact that you have utterly ruined him,” said Anna, moving to break up the parting interview.  Lena turned to follow her.

“Ladies, if it is I who have hardened your hearts, I am more guilty than I thought.”  Vittoria said no more.  She knew that she had been speaking badly, or ineffectually, by a haunting flatness of sound, as of an unstrung instrument, in her ears:  she was herself unstrung and dispirited, while the recollection of Anna’s voice was like a sombre conquering monotony on a low chord, with which she felt insufficient to compete.

Leone was waiting in the carriage to drive to the ferry across the Adige.  There was news in Roveredo of the king’s advance upon Rivoli; and Leone sat trying to lift and straighten out his wounded arm, with grimaces of laughter at the pain of the effort, which resolutely refused to acknowledge him to be an able combatant.  At the carriage-door Wilfrid bowed once over Vittoria’s hand.

“You see that,” Anna remarked to her sister.

“I should have despised him if he had acted indifference,” replied Lena.

She would have suspected him—­that was what her heart meant; the artful show of indifference had deceived her once.  The anger within her drew its springs much more fully from his refusal to respond to her affection, when she had in a fit of feminine weakness abased herself before him on the night of the Milanese revolt, than from the recollection of their days together in Meran.  She had nothing of her sister’s unforgivingness.  And she was besides keenly curious to discover the nature of the charm Vittoria threw on him, and not on him solely.  Vittoria left Wilfrid to better chances than she supposed.  “Continue fighting with your army,” she said, when they parted.  The deeper shade which traversed his features told her that, if she pleased, her sway might still be active; but she had no emotion to spare for sentimental regrets.  She asked herself whether a woman who has cast her lot in scenes of strife does not lose much of her womanhood and something of her truth; and while her imagination remained depressed, her answer was sad.  In that mood she pitied Wilfrid with a reckless sense of her inability to repay him for the harm she had done him.  The tragedies written in fresh blood all about her, together with that ever-present image of the fate of Italy hanging in the balance, drew her away from personal reflections.