He insisted upon lighting his mother to her room.  Vittoria and Agostino sat talking of the Chief and the minor events of the war—­of Luciano, Marco, Giulio, and Ugo Corte—­till the conviction fastened on them that Carlo would not return, when Agostino stood up and said, yawning wearily, “I’ll talk further to you, my child, tomorrow.”

She begged that it might be now.

“No; to-morrow,” said he.

“Now, now!” she reiterated, and brought down a reproof from his fore-finger.

“The poetic definition of ‘now’ is that it is a small boat, my daughter, in which the female heart is constantly pushing out to sea and sinking.  ‘To-morrow’ is an island in the deeps, where grain grows.  When I land you there, I will talk to you.”

She knew that he went to join Carlo after he had quitted her.

Agostino was true to his promise next day.  He brought her nearer to what she had to face, though he did not help her vision much.  Carlo had gone before sunrise.

They sat on the terrace above the lake, screened from the sunlight by thick myrtle bushes.  Agostino smoked his loosely-rolled cigarettes, and Vittoria sipped chocolate and looked upward to the summit of Motterone, with many thoughts and images in her mind.

He commenced by giving her a love-message from Carlo.  “Hold fast to it that he means it:  conduct is never a straight index where the heart’s involved,” said the chuckling old man; “or it is not in times like ours.  You have been in the wrong, and your having a good excuse will not help you before the deciding fates.  Woman that you are! did you not think that because we were beaten we were going to rest for a very long while, and that your Carlo of yesterday was going to be your Carlo of to-day?”

Vittoria tacitly confessed to it.

“Ay,” he pursued, “when you wrote to him in the Val d’Intelvi, you supposed you had only to say, ‘I am ready,’ which was then the case.  You made your summer and left the fruits to hang, and now you are astounded that seasons pass and fruits drop.  You should have come to this place, if but for a pair of days, and so have fixed one matter in the chapter.  This is how the chapter has run on.  I see I talk to a stunned head; you are thinking that Carlo’s love for you can’t have changed:  and it has not, but occasion has gone and times have changed.  Now listen.  The countess desired the marriage.  Carlo could not go to you in Milan with the sword in his hand.  Therefore you had to come to him.  He waited for you, perhaps for his own preposterous lover’s sake as much as to make his mother’s heart easy.  If she loses him she loses everything, unless he leaves a wife to her care and the hope that her House will not be extinct, which is possibly not much more the weakness of old aristocracy than of human nature.