s Goddesses,
give they never so little, she had deigned to fondle hands with him; had
set the universe rocking with a visible heave of her bosom; jingled all
the keys of mystery; and had once (as to embalm herself in his
recollection), once had surrendered her lips to him. Countess Lena would
have espoused Ammiani, believing in her power to make an Austrian out of
such Italian material. The Piaveni revolt had stopped that and all their
intercourse by the division of the White Hand, as it was called;
otherwise, the hand of the corpse. Ammiani had known also Count Paul von
Lenkenstein. To his mind, death did not mean much, however pleasant life
might be: his father and his friend had gone to it gaily; and he himself
stood ready for the summons: but the contemplation of a domestic judicial
execution, which the Guidascarpi seemed to have done upon Count Paul,
affrighted him, and put an end to his temporary capacity for labour. He
felt as if a spent shot were striking on his ribs; it was the unknown
sensation of fear. Changeing, it became pity. 'Horrible deaths these
Austrians die!' he said.

For a while he regarded their lot as the hardest. A shaft of sunlight
like blazing brass warned him that the day dropped. He sent to his
mother's stables, and rode at a gallop round Milan, dining alone in one
of the common hotel gardens, where he was a stranger. A man may have good
nerve to face the scene which he is certain will be enacted, who shrinks
from an hour that is suspended in doubt. He was aware of the pallor and
chill of his looks, and it was no marvel to him when two sbirri in mufti,
foreign to Milan, set their eyes on him as they passed by to a vacant
table on the farther side of the pattering gold-fish pool, where he sat.
He divined that they might be in pursuit of the Guidascarpi, and alive to
read a troubled visage. 'Yet neither Rinaldo nor Angelo would look as I
do now,' he thought, perceiving that these men were judging by such
signs, and had their ideas. Democrat 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