was engaged in something besides
nursing.

Carlo pointed his finger to the sentence, and remarked, "I must have your
promise--a word from you is enough--that you will not meddle with any
intrigue."

Vittoria gave the promise, half trusting it to bring the lost bloom of
their love to him; but he received it as a plain matter of necessity.
Certain of his love, she wondered painfully that it should continue so
barren of music.

"Why am I to pledge myself that I will be useless?" she asked. "You mean,
my Carlo, that I am to sit still, and watch, and wait."

He answered, "I will tell you this much: I can be struck vitally through
you. In the game I am playing, I am able to defend myself. If you enter
it, distraction begins. Stay with my mother."

"Am I to know nothing?"

"Everything--in good time."

"I might--might I not help you, my Carlo?"

"Yes; and nobly too. And I show you the way."

Agostino and Carlo made an expedition to Turin. Before he went, Carlo
took her in his arms.

"Is it coming?" she said, shutting her eyelids like a child expecting the
report of firearms.

He pressed his lips to the closed eyes. "Not yet; but are you growing
timid?"

His voice seemed to reprove her.

She could have told him that keeping her in the dark among unknown
terrors ruined her courage; but the minutes were too precious, his touch
too sweet. In eyes and hands he had become her lover again. The blissful
minutes rolled away like waves that keep the sunshine out at sea.

Her solitude in the villa was beguiled by the arrival of the score of an
operatic scena, entitled "HAGAR," by Rocco Ricci, which she fancied that
either Carlo or her dear old master had sent, and she devoured it. She
thought it written expressly for her. With HAGAR she communed during the
long hours, and sang herself on to the verge of an imagined desert beyond
the mountain-shadowed lake and the last view of her beloved Motterone.
Hagar's face of tears in the Brerawas known to her; and Hagar in her
'Addio' gave the living voice to that dumb one. Vittoria revelled in the
delicious vocal misery. She expanded with the sorrow of poor Hagar, whose
tears refreshed her, and parted her from her recent narrowing
self-consciousness. The great green mountain fronted her like a living
presence. Motterone supplied the place of the robust and venerable
patriarch, whom she reproached, and worshipped, but with a fathomless
burdensome sense of cruel injustice, deeper