A fire was kindled within him, which burst in flames of colour on his cheeks; he could no longer collect his thoughts to listen to the conversation of his brother officers, and he left them. No one could have thought it strange that he should return home in good time, as he had already arranged to start early that night by the fast train, in order to be present the next day, when his father's bones were to be removed from the Malefactors' graveyard to a tomb of honour in his native town. CHAPTER V We have seen how Mansana bore himself in the funeral procession the next day, and we know now why he walked behind his father's bier with that elastic gait, that buoyant and springy step. He had expected to find in the woman he had insulted, an implacable adversary, and was prepared to meet her enmity with disdain. But a single glance in the Corso from the eyes of Theresa Leaney, as she stood there in all her triumphant brilliancy and beauty, had set up a new image in his soul. It was the image of Theresa herself as the radiant goddess and mistress of his being. Before her majestic purity, how false and empty seemed all the calumnies he had heard! How vulgar and insolent his own audacious attack upon her! Was _this_ the woman he had had the effrontery to persecute, to annoy? He pondered over the mental conditions which could make him capable of such a profanation. Step by step he traced their development, in his own harsh experiences of life, as he followed his father's body to the grave. He traced them back indeed to that father himself, since it was from him that he had inherited the bitter and perilous self-confidence which had sunk deep into his heart, and grown and flourished there. Under such influences he had indulged, to the full, the crude, wilful, egoism which had made him a law unto himself and his own desires and impulses the only standard by which he tested his actions, even as his father had done before him. How often he had seen his mother weep! How often that noble and beautiful lady, as she sat alone with her boys, had let her tears fall in silent reproach of the man who had sacrificed wife, children, fortune, in a feverish pursuit of shadows. Yes, of shadows; for what was it that urged him on but the obstinate pride, the ambition, the vindictiveness, which in the beginning are often associated with patriotism and in the end are apt to become its masters? Giuseppe Mansana understood this as he thought over his own case and that of hundreds of others who passed in review before his mind. The music clashed, the cannon thundered, the air was heavy with flowers and quivering with "Evvivas" in honour of his dead father's memory.