left the Piazza del Popolo, Torre del Greco. To-morrow, if their
business is finished to-night, they will vanish again; and I shall be
dismissed."

"If their business is finished?" repeated Lind, absently. "Yes; but I
should like to know why they have summoned me all the way from England.
They cannot mean--"

"My dear friend Lind," said Calabressa, "you must not look so grave.
Nothing that is going to happen is worth one's troubling one's self
about. It is the present moment that is of consequence; and at the
present moment I have a joke for you. You know Armfeldt, who is now at
Berne: they had tried him only four times in Berlin; and there was only
a little matter of nine years' sentence against him. Listen."

He took up the _Osservatore_, and read out a paragraph, stating that Dr.
Julius Armfeldt had again been tried _in contumaciam_, and sentenced to
a further term of two years' imprisonment, for seditious writing.
Further, the publisher of his latest pamphlet, a citizen of Berne, had
likewise been sentenced in his absence to twelve months' imprisonment.

"Do they think Armfeldt will live to be a centenarian, that they keep
heaping up those sentences against him? Or is it as another inducement
for him to go back to his native country and give himself up? It is a
great joke, this childish proceeding; but a Government should not
declare itself impotent. It is like the Austrians when they hanged you
and the others in effigy. Now I remember, the little Natalushka was
grieved that she was not born then; for she wished to see the spectacle,
and to have killed the people who insulted her father."