The coffee was brought by the heavy-browed young woman.  Before she quitted the place Barto desired her to cast her eyes on Luigi, and say whether she thought she should know him again.  She scarcely glanced, and gave answer with a shrug of the shoulders as she retired.  Luigi at the time was drinking.  He rose; he was about to speak, but yawned instead.  The woman’s carelessly-dropped upper eyelids seemed to him to be reading him through a dozen of his contortions and disguises, and checked the idea of liberty which he associated with getting to the daylight.

“But it is worth the money!” shouted Barto Rizzo, with a splendid divination of his thought.  “You skulker! are you not paid and fattened to do business which you’ve only to remember, and it’ll honey your legs in purgatory?  You’re the shooting-dog of that Greek, and you nose about the bushes for his birds, and who cares if any fellow, just for exercise, shoots a dagger a yard from his wrist and sticks you in the back?  You serve me, and there’s pay for you; brothers, doctors, nurses, friends,—­a tight blanket if you fall from a housetop! and masses for your soul when your hour strikes.  The treacherous cur lies rotting in a ditch!  Do you conceive that when I employ you I am in your power?  Your intelligence will open gradually.  Do you know that here in this house I can conceal fifty men, and leave the door open to the Croats to find them?  I tell you now—­you are free; go forth.  You go alone; no one touches you; ten years hence a skeleton is found with an English letter on its ribs—­”

“Oh, stop! signor Barto, and be a blessed man,” interposed Luigi, doubling and wriggling in a posture that appeared as if he were shaking negatives from the elbows of his crossed arms.  “Stop.  How did you know of a letter?  I forgot—­I have seen the English lady at her hotel.  I was carrying the signorina’s answer, when I thought ‘Barto Rizzo calls me,’ and I came like a lamb.  And what does it matter?  She is a good patriot; you are a good patriot; here it is.  Consider my reputation, do; and be careful with the wax.”

Barto drew a long breath.  The mention of the English letter had been a shot in the dark.  The result corroborated his devotional belief in the unerringness of his own powerful intuition.  He had guessed the case, or hardly even guessed it—­merely stated it, to horrify Luigi.  The letter was placed in his hands, and he sat as strongly thrilled by emotion, under the mask of his hard face, as a lover hearing music.  “I read English,” he remarked.

After he had drawn the seal three or four times slowly over the lamp, the green wax bubbled and unsnapped.  Vittoria had written the following lines in reply to her old English friend:—­