upon trust from you.'

'Brutal Austrians!' Pericles murmured. 'And you do not think much of her
voice, General?'

'Pretty fair, sir.'

'What wonder she does not care to open her throat to these swine!'
thought the changed Greek.

Vittoria's door was shut to Agostino. No voice within gave answer. He
tried the lock of the door, and departed. She sat in a stupor. It was
harder for her to make a second appearance than it was to make the first,
when the shameful suspicion cruelly attached to her had helped to balance
her steps with rebellious pride; and more, the great collected wave of
her ambitious years of girlhood had cast her forward to the spot, as in a
last effort for consummation. Now that she had won the public voice
(love, her heart called it) her eyes looked inward; she meditated upon
what she had to do, and coughed nervously. She frightened herself with
her coughing, and shivered at the prospect of again going forward in the
great nakedness of stagelights and thirsting eyes. And, moreover, she
was not strengthened by the character of the music and the poetry of the
second Act:--a knowledge of its somewhat inferior quality may possibly
have been at the root of Agostino's dread of an anticlimax. The seconda
donna had the chief part in it--notably an aria (Rocco had given it to
her in compassion) that suited Irma's pure shrieks and the tragic
skeleton she could be. Vittoria knew how low she was sinking when she
found her soul in the shallows of a sort of jealousy of Irma. For a
little space she lost all intimacy with herself; she looked at her face
in the glass and swallowed water, thinking that she had strained a dream