"I am writing to Uncle Piero to ask his forgiveness for depriving him of your company for one day.
"I do not apprehend any danger. The Austrians are thinking only of their arms, and their police are letting thousands of young men escape them, young men who come here to take up arms. The Austrians would be terrible the day after a victory, but, God willing! that day shall never dawn for them.
"Luisa, can it be possible I shall not find you at Isola Bella, that you may think you are pleasing Maria by not coming? But don't you know that if some one had said to my Maria, to my poor little darling—run and say good-bye to your papa, who is perhaps going away to die—how fast——"
The reader's voice trembled, broke, and was lost in a sob. Luisa hid her face in her hands. He placed the letter on her knees, saying with difficulty: "Donna Luisa, can you hesitate?"
"I am wicked," Luisa murmured. "I am mad!"
"But do you not love him?"
"Sometimes I think I love him very much, at other times not at all."
"My God!" the professor exclaimed. "But now? Are you not moved by the thought that you may never see him again?"
Luisa was silent, she seemed to be crying. Suddenly she started to her feet, pressing her hands to her temples, and fixed her eyes on the professor's face, eyes in which there were no tears, but in which there shone a sinister and angry light. "You don't know," she cried, "what there is here in my head! What a mass of contradictions, how many opposite thoughts that are struggling together, and always changing places with each other! When I received the letter I cried bitterly, and said to myself. 'Yes, my poor Franco, this time I will go!'—And then there came a voice that spoke here in my forehead, and said: 'No, you must not go because—because—because——'"
She ceased speaking, and the professor, terrified by the flashes of madness he saw in those eyes that were fixed on his, did not dare to ask for an explanation. The eyes, which still stared into his, gradually softened and became veiled with tears. Luisa took his hands, and said gently, timidly: "Let us ask Maria."