hung swaying between them, as in drowsiness or drunkenness. Like his
body, his faith was swaying within him. He felt it borne upon the
reeling brain, and clung to it desperately, calling upon chance to aid
him; for he was weak, incapable of a physical or mental contest, and this
part of his settled creed that human beings alone failed the patriotic
cause as instruments, while circumstances constantly befriended it--was
shocked by present events. The image of Vittoria, the traitress, floated
over the soldiery marching on Milan through her treachery. Never had an
Austrian force seemed to him so terrible. He had to yield the internal
fight, and let his faith sink and be blackened, in order that his mind
might rest supine, according to his remembered system; for the
inspiration which points to the right course does not come during mental
strife, but after it, when faith summons its agencies undisturbed--if
only men will have the faith, and will teach themselves to know that the
inspiration must come, and will counsel them justly. This was a part of
Barto Rizzo's sustaining creed; nor did he lose his grasp of it in the
torment and the darkness of his condition.

He heard English voices. A carriage had stopped almost in front of him.
A General officer was hat in hand, talking to a lady, who called him
uncle, and said that she had been obliged to decide to quit Verona on
account of her husband, to whom the excessive heat was unendurable. Her
husband, in the same breath, protested that the heat killed him. He
adorned the statement with all kinds of domestic and subterranean
imagery, and laughed faintly, saying that after the fifteenth--on which
night his wife insisted upon going to the Opera at Milan to hear a new
singer and old friend--he should try a week at the Baths of Bormio, and
only drop from the mountains when a proper temperature reigned, he being
something of an invalid.