I have read them. Who
bids her write? Her whim! She warns her friends not to enter Milan.
She--whose puppet is she? Not yours; not mine. She is the puppet of an
English Austrian!'

Barto drew back, for Ammiani was advancing.

'What is it you mean?' he cried.

'I mean,' said Ammiani, still moving on him, 'I mean to drag you first
before Count Medole, and next before the signorina; and you shall abjure
your slander in her presence. After that I shall deal with you. Mark me!
I have you: I am swifter on foot, and I am stronger. Come quietly.'

Barto smiled in grim contempt.

'Keep your foot fast on that stone, you're a prisoner,' he replied,
and seeing Ammiani coming, 'Net him, my sling-stone! my serpent!'
he signalled to his wife, who threw herself right round Ammiani in a
tortuous twist hard as wire-rope. Stung with irritation, and a sense of
disgrace and ridicule and pitifulness in one, Ammiani, after a struggle,
ceased the attempt to disentwine her arms, and dragged her clinging
to him. He was much struck by hearing her count deliberately, in her
desperation, numbers from somewhere about twenty to one hundred. One
hundred was evidently the number she had to complete, for when she had
reached it she threw her arms apart. Barto was out of sight. Ammiani
waved her on to follow in his steps: he was sick of her presence, and
had the sensations of a shame-faced boy whom a girl has kissed. She went
without uttering a word.

The dawn had now traversed the length of the streets, and thrown open
the wide spaces of the city. Ammiani found himself singing, 'There's yet
a heart in Italy!' but it was hardly the song of his own heart. He slept
that night on a chair in the private room of his office, preferring not
to go to his mother's house. 'There 's yet a heart in Italy!' was on his
lips when he awoke with scattered sensations, all of which collected
in revulsion against the song. 'There's a very poor heart in Italy!' he
said, while getting his person into decent order; 'it's like the bell in
the lunatic's tower between Venice and the Lido: it beats now and then
for meals: hangs like a carrion-lump in the vulture's beak meanwhile!'

These and some other similar sentiments, and a heat about the brows
whenever he set them frowning over what Barto had communicated
concerning an English Austrian, assured Ammiani that he had no proper
command of himself: or was, as the doctors would have told him, bilious.
It seemed to him that