Later in the day, Laura and Vittoria, with Agostino, reached the villa; and Adela put her lips to Vittoria’s ear, whispering:  “Naughty! when are you to lose your liberty to turn men’s heads?” and then she heaved a sigh with Wilfrid’s name.  She had formed the acquaintance of Countess d’Isorella in Turin, she said, and satisfactorily repeated her lesson, but with a blush.  She was little more than a shade to Vittoria, who wondered what she had to live for.  After the early evening dinner, when sunlight and the colours of the sun were beyond the western mountains, they pushed out on the lake.  A moon was overhead, seeming to drop lower on them as she filled with light.

Agostino and Vittoria fell upon their theme of discord, as usual—­the King of Sardinia.

“We near the vesper hour, my daughter,” said Agostino; “you would provoke me to argumentation in heaven itself.  I am for peace.  I remember looking down on two cats with arched backs in the solitary arena of the Verona amphitheatre.  We men, my Carlo, will not, in the decay of time, so conduct ourselves.”

Vittoria looked on Laura and thought of the cannon-sounding hours, whose echoes rolled over their slaughtered hope.  The sun fell, the moon shone, and the sun would rise again, but Italy lay face to earth.  They had seen her together before the enemy.  That recollection was a joy that stood, though the winds beat at it, and the torrents.  She loved her friend’s worn eyelids and softly-shut mouth; the after-glow of battle seemed on them; the silence of the field of carnage under heaven;—­and the patient turning of Laura’s eyes this way and that to speakers upon common things, covered the despair of her heart as with a soldier’s cloak.

Laura met the tender study of Vittoria’s look, and smiled.

They neared the Villa Ricciardi, and heard singing.  The villa was lighted profusely, so that it made a little mock-sunset on the lake.

“Irma!” said Vittoria, astonished at the ring of a well-known voice that shot up in firework fashion, as Pericles had said of it.  Incredulous, she listened till she was sure; and then glanced hurried questions at all eyes.  Violetta laughed, saying, “You have the score of Rocco Ricci’s Hagar.”

The boat drew under the blazing windows, and half guessing, half hearing, Vittoria understood that Pericles was giving an entertainment here, and had abjured her.  She was not insensible to the slight.  This feeling, joined to her long unsatisfied craving to sing, led her to be intolerant of Irma’s style, and visibly vexed her.

Violetta whispered:  “He declares that your voice is cracked:  show him!  Burst out with the ‘Addio’ of Hagar.  May she not, Carlo?  Don’t you permit the poor soul to sing?  She cannot contain herself.”

Carlo, Adela, Agostino, and Violetta prompted her, and, catching a pause in the villa, she sang the opening notes of Hagar’s ‘Addio’ with her old glorious fulness of tone and perfect utterance.