At Colorno itself, connected with the city by this scattered procession of men and vehicles, the business of preparation was being pushed forward as assiduously as though the duke were visiting his summer residence for the first time. Everyone was in a state of agitation, and either tetchy or nervous, or both. Cook, lackey, chambermaid and the rest--they seemed all overtaken, as those roused ones in the sleeping palace might have been, by a vague sense of guilt, and a feverish desire to make up by haste for something unaccountably lost--was it a minute or a hundred years? A general air of rush and panic pervaded the place, extending itself from garret to basement, and affecting the marquise in her _salon_ no less than the little mop-squeezer whitening the boards in her attic. They felt the change in their blood like the first irritating processes of a tonic drug. Madame herself was as obstreperous and intolerable as, in their excitement, she found her young charges. She waxed shrilly voluble over the information that Isabella was confined to her rooms with a headache. It was monstrous, unnatural, she cried, thus to shut herself away in the face of this imminent arrival, to dissociate herself from the atmosphere of general rejoicing that prevailed. Her relations with the Infanta had long been strained; she was never so gratified as when she could cite evidence of unnaturalness against this natural soul. It is always for such as she to suspect hypocrisy in what is purely genuine.