Laura took his hand.  She found it moist, though his face was calm and his chest heaved regularly.  An impish form of the pity women feel for us at times moved her to say, “Your skin is as bronzed as it was last year.  Sandra spoke of it.  She compared it to a young vine-leaf.  I wonder whether girls have really an admonition of what is good for them while they are going their ways like destined machines?”

“Almost all men are of flesh and blood,” said Merthyr softly.

“I spoke of girls.”

“I speak of men.”

“Blunt—­witted that I am!  Of course you did.  But do not imagine that she is not happy with her husband.  They are united firmly.”

“The better for her, and him, and me,” said Merthyr.

Laura twisted an end of her scarf with fretful fingers.  “Carlo Albert has crossed the Ticino?”

“Is about to do so,” Merthyr rejoined.

“Will Rome hold on if he is defeated?”

“Rome has nothing to fear on that side.”

“But you do not speak hopefully of Rome.”

“I suppose I am thinking of other matters.”

“You confess it!”

The random conversation wearied him.  His foot tapped the floor.

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

“Verily, for no other reason than that I have a wicked curiosity, and that you come from Rome,” said Laura, now perfectly frank, and believing that she had explained her enigmatical talk, if she had not furnished an excuse for it.  Merthyr came from the City which was now encircled by an irradiating halo in her imagination, and a fit of spontaneous inexplicable feminine tenderness being upon her at the moment of their meeting, she found herself on a sudden prompted to touch and probe and brood voluptuously over an unfortunate lover’s feelings, supposing that they existed.  For the glory of Rome was on him, and she was at the same time angry with Carlo Ammiani.  It was the form of passion her dedicated widowhood could still be subject to in its youth; the sole one.  By this chance Merthyr learnt what nothing else would have told him.

Her tale of the attempted assassination was related with palpable indifference.  She stated the facts.  “The woman seemed to gasp while she had her hand up; she struck with no force; and she has since been inanimate, I hear.  The doctor says that a spasm of the heart seized her when she was about to strike.  It has been shaken—­I am not sure that he does not say displaced, or unseated—­by some one of her black tempers.  She shot Rinaldo Guidascarpi dead.  Perhaps it was that.  I am informed that she worshipped the poor boy, and has been like a trapped she-wolf since she did it.  In some way she associated our darling with Rinaldo’s death, like the brute she is.  The ostensible ground for her futile bit of devilishness was that she fancied Sandra to have betrayed Barto Rizzo, her husband, into the hands of the polizia.  He wrote to the Countess Alessandra—­such a letter!—­a