en, 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's words, and thought of what she had done,
in terror and remorse, and tried to ask if the people would be fighting
now, but could not. Laura seemed to stand before her like a Fury
stretching her finger at the dear brave men whom she had hurled upon
the bayonets and the guns. It was an unendurable anguish. Giacinta
wa