The discovery was made by the astounded nobleman on the day preceding Vittoria’s appearance at La Scala.  His daughter being absent, he had visited the cupboard merely to satisfy an habitual curiosity.  The cupboard was open, and had evidently been ransacked.  He rang up the domestics, and would have charged them all with having done violence to the key, but that on reflection he considered this to be a way of binding faggots together, and he resolved to take them one by one, like the threading Jesuit that he was, and so get a Judas.  Laura’s return saved him from much exercise of his peculiar skill.  She, with a cool ‘Ebbene!’ asked him how long he had expected the money to remain there.  Upon which, enraged, he accused her of devoting the money to the accursed patriotic cause.  And here they came to a curious open division.

‘Be content, my father,’ she said; ’the money is my husband’s, and is expended on his behalf.’

‘You waste it among the people who were the cause of his ruin!’ her father retorted.

‘You presume me to have returned it to the Government, possibly?’

‘I charge you with tossing it to your so-called patriots.’

‘Sir, if I have done that, I have done well.’

‘Hear her!’ cried the count to the attentive ceiling; and addressing her with an ironical ‘madame,’ he begged permission to inquire of her whether haply she might be the person in the pay of Revolutionists who was about to appear at La Scala, under the name of the Signorina Vittoria.  ’For you are getting dramatic in your pose, my Laura,’ he added, familiarizing the colder tone of his irony.  ’You are beginning to stand easily in attitudes of defiance to your own father.’

‘That I may practise how to provoke a paternal Government, you mean,’ she rejoined, and was quite a match for him in dialectics.

The count chanced to allude further to the Signorina Vittoria.

‘Do you know much of that lady?’ she asked.

‘As much as is known,’ said he.

They looked at one another; the count thinking, ’I gave to this girl an excess of brains, in my folly!’

Compelled to drop his eyes, and vexed by the tacit defeat, he pursued, ‘You expect great things from her?’

‘Great,’ said his daughter.

‘Well, well,’ he murmured acquiescingly, while sounding within himself for the part to play.  ‘Well-yes! she may do what you expect.’

‘There is not the slightest doubt of her capacity,’ said his daughter, in a tone of such perfect conviction that the count was immediately and irresistibly tempted to play the part of sagacious, kindly, tolerant but foreseeing father; and in this becoming character he exposed the risks her party ran in trusting anything of weight to a woman.  Not that he decried women.  Out of their sphere he did not trust them, and he simply objected to them when out of their sphere:  the last four words being uttered staccato.