“Well,” said Lind, when they had exchanged salutations, “this is a pleasant sort of a morning for one to have one’s breakfast outside!”

“My faith,” said Calabressa, “if you had taken as many breakfasts as I have shut up in a hole, you would be glad to get the chance of a mouthful of fresh air.  Sit down, my friend.”

Lind glanced round, and then sat down.

“My good friend Calabressa,” he said presently, “for one connected as you are with certain persons, do you not think now that your costume is a little conspicuous?  And then your sitting out here in broad daylight—­”

“My friend Lind,” said he, with a laugh, “I am as safe here as if I were in Naples, which I believe to be the safest place in the world for one not in good odor with the authorities.  And if there was a risk, would I not run it to hear my little nightingale over there when she opens the casements?  Ah! she is the most charming Rosina in the world.”

“Yes, yes,” said Lind.  “I am not speaking of you.  But—­the others.  The police must guess you are not here for nothing.”

“Oh, the others?  Rest assured.  The police might as well try to put their fingers on a globule of quicksilver.  It is but three days since they left the Piazza del Popolo, Torre del Greco.  To-morrow, if their business is finished to-night, they will vanish again; and I shall be dismissed.”

“If their business is finished?” repeated Lind, absently.  “Yes; but I should like to know why they have summoned me all the way from England.  They cannot mean—­”

“My dear friend Lind,” said Calabressa, “you must not look so grave.  Nothing that is going to happen is worth one’s troubling one’s self about.  It is the present moment that is of consequence; and at the present moment I have a joke for you.  You know Armfeldt, who is now at Berne:  they had tried him only four times in Berlin; and there was only a little matter of nine years’ sentence against him.  Listen.”

He took up the Osservatore, and read out a paragraph, stating that Dr. Julius Armfeldt had again been tried in contumaciam, and sentenced to a further term of two years’ imprisonment, for seditious writing.  Further, the publisher of his latest pamphlet, a citizen of Berne, had likewise been sentenced in his absence to twelve months’ imprisonment.

“Do they think Armfeldt will live to be a centenarian, that they keep heaping up those sentences against him?  Or is it as another inducement for him to go back to his native country and give himself up?  It is a great joke, this childish proceeding; but a Government should not declare itself impotent.  It is like the Austrians when they hanged you and the others in effigy.  Now I remember, the little Natalushka was grieved that she was not born then; for she wished to see the spectacle, and to have killed the people who insulted her father.”