have avoided the city. The thought of entering it was painful with the
shrewdest pain. Dante's profoundly human line seemed branded on the
forehead of Milan.

The morning was dark when they drove through the streets of Bergamo.
Passing one of the open places, Vittoria beheld a great concourse of
volunteer youth and citizens, all of them listening to the voice of one
who stood a few steps above them holding a banner. She gave an outcry of
bitter joy. It was the Chief. On one side of him was Agostino, in the
midst of memorable heads that were unknown to her. The countess refused
to stay, though Vittoria strained her hands together in extreme entreaty
that she might for a few moments hear what the others were hearing.
"I speak for my son, and I forbid it," Countess Ammiani said. Vittoria
fell back and closed her eyes to cherish the vision. All those faces
raised to the one speaker under the dark sky were beautiful. He had
breathed some new glory of hope in them, making them shine beneath the
overcast heavens, as when the sun breaks from an evening cloud and
flushes the stems of a company of pine-trees.

Along the road to Milan she kept imagining his utterance until her heart
rose with music. A delicious stream of music, thin as poor tears, passed
through her frame, like a life reviving. She reached Milan in a mood to
bear the idea of temporary defeat. Music had forsaken her so long that
celestial reassurance seemed to return with it.

Her mother was at Zotti's, very querulous, but determined not to leave
the house and the few people she knew. She had, as she told her
daughter, fretted so much on her account that she hardly knew whether she
was glad to see her. Tea, of course, she had given up all thoughts of;
but now coffee was rising, and the boasted sweet bread of Lombardy was