I looked up after reading this brief but expressive message, and the face of the gaunt spectre who stood before me was flushed, and his head was in the air, as if he had read it with me, and was proud of the testimony it conveyed on his behalf. I asked him to be seated, and gave him to understand that anybody carrying such a recommendation was welcome. He held out a long, lean hand, and when I gave him my own stooped over it and kissed it. “Sir,” he said, “you have done more than restore an individual to liberty. You have reanimated a cause: you have inspired a people. There are a thousand of us at this hour in London to whom the name of the Conte di Rossano is a legend and an inspiration. Twenty years ago he was our leader--a spirit of the subtlest and most indomitable. A soul without fear, and of resource astonishingly varied. 'You have restored him to us, and before a month is over his name will ring through Italy. We are preparing for such a rising as we have never made. For years our names have been written on the sands of failure. We shall write them to-morrow on the lasting granite of success.” He talked with any amount of fire and vigor, and in a voice pitched so high that he might have been haranguing a multitude. He gesticulated with the shabby old hat and the slim walking-stick as if he had been wielding sword and buckler in an opera, and his narrow chest swelled under the tight buttons of his ragged old frock-coat. Every English word he spoke was supplemented by an Italian vowel, so that his language, though it was perfectly fluent and correct, sounded quite foreign. His extraordinary height and leanness made him grotesque to look at, but neither the comicality of his figure nor his theatrical voice and gesture could kill the fact that he was in earnest, and I felt an immediate liking for him. “I am not here,” he said, “on a visit of impertinence. I have an actual object. I am charged by the Conte di Rossano to tell you that a meeting has been already arranged to welcome him to London. It will be held to-night, and he beseeches you through me to be present at it.” I demurred at first, for I had no mind to be publicly embraced by the tatterdemalion patriots I had seen in the crowd that morning. But when my visitor incidentally mentioned the fact that Miss Rossano would accompany her father, I gave him my promise at once. The ragged nobleman promised to call and conduct me to the place of meeting, and so went his way with a torrent of thanks and a rage of gesticulation. CHAPTER VIII