He answered, “I will tell you this much:  I can be struck vitally through you.  In the game I am playing, I am able to defend myself.  If you enter it, distraction begins.  Stay with my mother.”

“Am I to know nothing?”

“Everything—­in good time.”

“I might—­might I not help you, my Carlo?”

“Yes; and nobly too.  And I show you the way.”

Agostino and Carlo made an expedition to Turin.  Before he went, Carlo took her in his arms.

“Is it coming?” she said, shutting her eyelids like a child expecting the report of firearms.

He pressed his lips to the closed eyes.  “Not yet; but are you growing timid?”

His voice seemed to reprove her.

She could have told him that keeping her in the dark among unknown terrors ruined her courage; but the minutes were too precious, his touch too sweet.  In eyes and hands he had become her lover again.  The blissful minutes rolled away like waves that keep the sunshine out at sea.

Her solitude in the villa was beguiled by the arrival of the score of an operatic scena, entitled “Hagar,” by Rocco Ricci, which she fancied that either Carlo or her dear old master had sent, and she devoured it.  She thought it written expressly for her.  With Hagar she communed during the long hours, and sang herself on to the verge of an imagined desert beyond the mountain-shadowed lake and the last view of her beloved Motterone.  Hagar’s face of tears in the Brerawas known to her; and Hagar in her ‘Addio’ gave the living voice to that dumb one.  Vittoria revelled in the delicious vocal misery.  She expanded with the sorrow of poor Hagar, whose tears refreshed her, and parted her from her recent narrowing self-consciousness.  The great green mountain fronted her like a living presence.  Motterone supplied the place of the robust and venerable patriarch, whom she reproached, and worshipped, but with a fathomless burdensome sense of cruel injustice, deeper than the tears or the voice which spoke of it:  a feeling of subjected love that was like a mother’s giving suck to a detested child.  Countess Ammiani saw the abrupt alteration of her step and look with a dim surprise.  “What do you conceal from me?” she asked, and supplied the answer by charitably attributing it to news that the signora Piaveni was coming.

When Laura came, the countess thanked her, saying, “I am a wretched companion for this boiling head.”

Laura soon proved to her that she had been the best, for after very few hours Vittoria was looking like the Hagar on the canvas.