ilfrid with a shyly extended
hand. A carriage was drawn up by the kerbstone; the doors of it were
open. She had barely made a word intelligible; when Major de Pyrmont
pointed to some officers approaching. 'Get her out of the way while
there's time,' he said in French to Luciano. 'This is her carriage.
Swiftly, gentlemen, or she's lost.'

Giacinta read his meaning by signs, and caught her mistress by the
sleeve, using force. She and Major de Pyrmont placed Vittoria,
bewildered, in the carriage; De Pyrmont shut the door, and signalled to
the coachman. Vittoria thrust her head out for a last look at her lover,
and beheld him with the arms of dark-clothed men upon him. La Scala was
pouring forth its occupants in struggling roaring shoals from every door.
Her outcry returned to her deadened in the rapid rolling of the carriage
across the lighted Piazza. Giacinta had to hold her down with all her
might. Great clamour was for one moment heard by them, and then a rushing
voicelessness. Giacinta screamed to the coachman till she was exhausted.
Vittoria sank shuddering on the lap of her maid, hiding her face that she
might plunge out of recollection.

The lightnings shot across her brain, but wrote no legible thing; the
scenes of the opera lost their outlines as in a white heat of fire. She
tried to weep, and vainly asked her heart for tears, that this dry
dreadful blind misery of mere sensation might be washed out of her, and
leave her mind clear to grapple with evil; and then, as the lurid breaks
come in a storm-driven night sky, she had the picture of her lover in the
hands of enemies, and of Wilfrid in the white uniform; the torment of her
living passion, the mockery of her passion by-gone. Recollection, when it
came back, overwhelmed her; she swayed from recollection to oblivion, and
was like a caged wild thing. Giacinta had to be as a mother with her. The
poor trembling girl, who had begun to perceive that the carriage was
bearing them to some unknown destination, tore open the bands of her
corset and drew her mistress's head against the full warmth of her bosom,
rocked her, and moaned over her, mixing comfort and lamentation in one
offering, and so contrived to draw the tears out from her, a storm of
tears; not fitfully hysterical, but tears that poured a black veil over
the eyeballs, and fell steadily streaming. Once subdued by the weakness,
Vittoria's nature melted; she shook piteously with weeping; she
remembered Laura