“Why, it’s to find you, signorina.”

Luigi’s comical emphasis conjured up in a jumbled picture the devotion, the fury, the zeal, the terror of Antonio-Pericles—­a mixture of demoniacal energy and ludicrous trepidation.  She imagined his long figure, fantastical as a shadow, off at huge strides, and back, with eyes sliding swiftly to the temples, and his odd serpent’s head raised to peer across the plains and occasionally to exclaim to the reasonable heavens in anger at men and loathing of her.  She laughed ungovernably.  Luigi exclaimed that, albeit in disgrace with the signor Antonio, he had been sent for to serve him afresh, and had now been sent forward to entreat the gracious signorina to grant her sincerest friend and adorer an interview.  She laughed at Pericles, but in truth she almost loved the man for his worship of her Art, and representation of her dear peaceful practice of it.

The interview between them took place at Oliosi.  There, also, she met Georgiana Ford, the half-sister of Merthyr Powys, who told her that Merthyr and Augustus Gambier were in the ranks of a volunteer contingent in the king’s army, and might have been present at Pastrengo.  Georgiana held aloof from battle-fields, her business being simply to serve as Merthyr’s nurse in case of wounds, or to see the last of him in case of death.  She appeared to have no enthusiasm.  She seconded strongly the vehement persuasions addressed by Pericles to Vittoria.  Her disapproval of the presence of her sex on fields of battle was precise.  Pericles had followed the army to give Vittoria one last chance, he said, and drag her away from this sick country, as he called it, pointing at the dusty land from the windows of the inn.  On first seeing her he gasped like one who has recovered a lost thing.  To Laura he was a fool; but Vittoria enjoyed his wildest outbursts, and her half-sincere humility encouraged him to think that he had captured her at last.  He enlarged on the perils surrounding her voice in dusty bellowing Lombardy, and on the ardour of his friendship in exposing himself to perils as tremendous, that he might rescue her.  While speaking he pricked a lively ear for the noise of guns, hearing a gun in everything, and jumping to the window with horrid imprecations.  His carriage was horsed at the doors below.  Let the horses die, he said, let the coachman have sun-stroke.  Let hundreds perish, if Vittoria would only start in an hour-in two—­to-night—­to-morrow.

“Because, do you see,”—­he turned to Laura and Georgiana, submitting to the vexatious necessity of seeming reasonable to these creatures,—­“she is a casket for one pearl.  It is only one, but it is one, mon Dieu! and inscrutable heaven, mesdames, has made the holder of it mad.  Her voice has but a sole skin; it is not like a body; it bleeds to death at a scratch.  A spot on the pearl, and it is perished—­pfoof!  Ah, cruel thing! impious, I say.  I have watched, I have reared