like blazing brass warned him that the day dropped. He sent to his
mother's stables, and rode at a gallop round Milan, dining alone in one
of the common hotel gardens, where he was a stranger. A man may have
good nerve to face the scene which he is certain will be enacted, who
shrinks from an hour that is suspended in doubt. He was aware of the
pallor and chill of his looks, and it was no marvel to him when two
sbirri in mufti, foreign to Milan, set their eyes on him as they passed
by to a vacant table on the farther side of the pattering gold-fish pool,
where he sat. He divined that they might be in pursuit of the
Guidascarpi, and alive to read a troubled visage. 'Yet neither Rinaldo
nor Angelo would look as I do now,' he thought, perceiving that these men
were judging by such signs, and had their ideas. Democrat as he imagined
himself to be, he despised with a nobleman's contempt creatures who were
so dead to the character of men of birth as to suppose that they were
pale and remorseful after dealing a righteous blow, and that they
trembled! Ammiani looked at his hand: no force of his will could arrest
its palsy. The Guidascarpi were sons of Bologna. The stupidity of
Italian sbirri is proverbial, or a Milanese cavalier would have been
astonished to conceive himself mistaken for a Bolognese. He beckoned to
the waiter, and said, 'Tell me what place has bred those two fellows on
the other side of the fountain.' After a side-glance of scrutiny, the
reply was, 'Neapolitans.' The waiter was ready to make an additional
remark, but Ammiani nodded and communed with a toothpick. He was sure
that those Neapolitans were recruits of the Bolognese Polizia; on the
track of the Guidascarpi, possibly. As he was not unlike Angelo
Guidascarpi in figure, he became uneasy lest they should blunder 'twixt
him and La Scala; and the notion of any human power stopping him short
of that destination, made Ammiani's hand perfectly firm. He drew on his
gloves, and named the place whither he was going, aloud. 'Excellency,'
said the waiter, while taking up and pretending to reckon the money for