as he imagined himself to be, he despised with a nobleman’s contempt creatures who were so dead to the character of men of birth as to suppose that they were pale and remorseful after dealing a righteous blow, and that they trembled!  Ammiani looked at his hand:  no force of his will could arrest its palsy.  The Guidascarpi were sons of Bologna.  The stupidity of Italian sbirri is proverbial, or a Milanese cavalier would have been astonished to conceive himself mistaken for a Bolognese.  He beckoned to the waiter, and said, ’Tell me what place has bred those two fellows on the other side of the fountain.’  After a side-glance of scrutiny, the reply was, ‘Neapolitans.’  The waiter was ready to make an additional remark, but Ammiani nodded and communed with a toothpick.  He was sure that those Neapolitans were recruits of the Bolognese Polizia; on the track of the Guidascarpi, possibly.  As he was not unlike Angelo Guidascarpi in figure, he became uneasy lest they should blunder ’twixt him and La Scala; and the notion of any human power stopping him short of that destination, made Ammiani’s hand perfectly firm.  He drew on his gloves, and named the place whither he was going, aloud.  ‘Excellency,’ said the waiter, while taking up and pretending to reckon the money for the bill:  ’they have asked me whether there are two Counts Ammiani in Milan.’  Carlo’s eyebrows started.  ’Can they be after me?’ he thought, and said:  ’Certainly; there is twice anything in this world, and Milan is the epitome of it.’

Acting a part gave him Agostino’s catching manner of speech.  The waiter, who knew him now, took this for an order to say ‘Yes.’  He had evidently a respect for Ammiani’s name:  Carlo supposed that he was one of Milan’s fighting men.  A sort of answer leading to ‘Yes’ by a circuit and the assistance of the hearer, was conveyed to the, sbirri.  They were true Neapolitans quick to suspect, irresolute upon their suspicions.  He was soon aware that they were not to be feared more than are the general race of bunglers, whom the Gods sometimes strangely favour.  They perplexed him:  for why were they after him? and what had made them ask whether he had a brother?  He was followed, but not molested, on his way to La Scala.

Ammiani’s heart was in full play as he looked at the curtain of the stage.  The Night of the Fifteenth had come.  For the first few moments his strong excitement fronting the curtain, amid a great host of hearts thumping and quivering up in the smaller measures like his own, together with the predisposing belief that this was to be a night of events, stopped his consciousness that all had been thwarted; that there was nothing but plot, plot, counterplot and tangle, disunion, silly subtlety, jealousy, vanity, a direful congregation of antagonistic elements; threads all loose, tongues wagging, pressure here, pressure there, like an uncertain rage in the entrails of the undirected earth, and no master hand on the spot to fuse and point the intense distracted forces.