The scene was like hot iron to Wilfrid’s senses.  When he heard her coolly asking him for his handkerchief to blind him, he had forgotten the purpose, and gave it mechanically.  Nothing was uttered throughout the long mountings and descent of stairs.  They passed across one corridor where the walls told of a humming assemblage of men within.  A current of keen air was the first salute Wilfrid received from the world above; his handkerchief was loosened; he stood foolish as a blind man, weak as a hospital patient, on the steps leading into a small square of visible darkness, and heard the door shut behind him.  Rinaldo led him from the court to the street.

“Farewell,” he said.  “Get some housing instantly; avoid exposure to the air.  I leave you.”

Wilfrid spent his tongue in a fruitless and meaningless remonstrance.  “And you?” he had the grace to ask.

“I go straight to find a priest.  Farewell.”

So they parted.

CHAPTER XXX

EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR

THE FIVE DAYS OF MILAN

The same hand which brought Rinaldo’s letter to his brother delivered a message from Barto Rizzo, bidding Angelo to start at once and head a stout dozen or so of gallant Swiss.  The letter and the message appeared to be grievous contradictions:  one was evidently a note of despair, while the other sang like a trumpet.  But both were of a character to draw him swiftly on to Milan.  He sent word to his Lugano friends, naming a village among the mountains between Como and Varese, that they might join him there if they pleased.

Toward nightfall, on the nineteenth of the month, he stood with a small band of Ticinese and Italian fighting lads two miles distant from the city.  There was a momentary break in long hours of rain; the air was full of inexplicable sounds, that floated over them like a toning of multitudes wailing and singing fitfully behind a swaying screen.  They bent their heads.  At intervals a sovereign stamp on the pulsation of the uproar said, distinct as a voice in the ear—­Cannon.  “Milan’s alive!” Angelo cried, and they streamed forward under the hurry of stars and scud, till thumping guns and pattering musket-shots, the long big boom of surgent hosts, and the muffled voluming and crash of storm-bells, proclaimed that the insurrection was hot.  A rout of peasants bearing immense ladders met them, and they joined with cheers, and rushed to the walls.  As yet no gate was in the possession of the people.  The walls showed bayonet-points:  a thin edge of steel encircled a pit of fire.  Angelo resolved to break through at once.  The peasants hesitated, but his own men were of one mind to follow, and, planting his ladder in the ditch, he rushed up foremost.  The ladder was full short; he called out in German to a soldier to reach his hand down, and the butt-end