Odo suspected a certain colourlessness in the life she depicted.  The tone of her letters was too uniformly cheerful not to suggest a lack of emotional variety; and he knew that Fulvia’s nature, however much she fancied it under the rule of reason, was in reality fed by profound currents of feeling.  Something of her old ardour reappeared when she wrote of the possibility of publishing her father’s book.  Her friends in Geneva, having heard of her difficulty with the Dutch publisher, had undertaken to vindicate her claims; and they had every hope that the matter would be successfully concluded.  The joy of renewed activity with which this letter glowed would have communicated itself to Odo had he received it at a different time; but it came on the day of his marriage, and since then he had never written to her.

Now he felt a sudden longing to break the silence between them, and seating himself at his desk he began to write.  A moment later there was a knock on the door and one of his gentlemen entered.  The Count Vittorio Alfieri, with a dozen horses and as many servants, was newly arrived at the Golden Cross, and desired to know when he might have the honour of waiting on his Highness.

Odo felt the sudden glow of pleasure that the news of Alfieri’s coming always brought.  Here was a friend at last!  He forgot the constraint of their last meeting in Florence, and remembered only the happy interchange of ideas and emotions that had been one of the quickening influences of his youth.

Alfieri, in the intervening years, was grown to be one of the foremost figures in Italy.  His love for the Countess of Albany, persisting through the vicissitudes of her tragic marriage, had rallied the scattered forces of his nature.  Ambitious to excel for her sake, to show himself worthy of such a love, he had at last shaken off the strange torpor of his youth, and revealed himself as the poet for whom Italy waited.  In ten months of feverish effort he had poured forth fourteen tragedies—­among them the Antigone, the Virginia, and the Conjuration of the Pazzi.  Italy started up at the sound of a new voice vibrating with passions she had long since unlearned.  Since Filicaja’s thrilling appeal to his enslaved country no poet had challenged the old Roman spirit which Petrarch had striven to rouse.  While the literati were busy discussing Alfieri’s blank verse, while the grammarians wrangled over his syntax and ridiculed his solecisms, the public, heedless of such niceties, was glowing with the new wine which he had poured into the old vessels of classic story.  “Liberty” was the cry that rang on the lips of all his heroes, in accents so new and stirring that his audience never wearied of its repetition.  It was no secret that his stories of ancient Greece and Rome were but allegories meant to teach the love of freedom; yet the Antigone had been performed in the private theatre of the Spanish Ambassador at Rome, the Virginia had been received with applause on the public boards at Turin, and after the usual difficulties with the censorship the happy author had actually succeeded in publishing his plays at Siena.  These volumes were already in Odo’s hands, and a manuscript copy of the Odes to Free America was being circulated among the liberals in Pianura, and had been brought to his notice by Andreoni.