BY threading one crooked back street and another he came out behind the Cathedral, upon whose southern wall and forest of spires a moon almost round poured its light. That he might keep in the shadow of the great Gothic pile he went to the northern side and walked there. The organ was pealing for even-song, and its strains floated out sublimely as he passed the transept door. He reflected that the last time he had heard those tones they sounded for his wedding march; and, his impulse to square accounts with Mario Forza quickened, he struck across the square at faster pace. To the bright Victor Emanuel Gallery, its throng of promenaders, or the laughing, talking men and women at the outdoor tables of the cafés, he gave no heed. The news of the day--set forth in the journals hysterically--was not taken with much seriousness in that company. The conflict of the morning, in Milan, between the workers and the soldiers was no worse in its result of killed and wounded than like conflicts in other towns of the kingdom that day and the day before. All of the newspapers appreciated the importance of what had befallen; a small number were sensitive of the danger that seemed to be in the air. An alarmist editor declared that from one end of the Peninsula to the other the word had passed to revolutionary centres to rise against the Government. The trouble was due chiefly to the dearness of bread. In the country districts it was aggravated by the strike of the agricultural labourers. Tuscany and Sicily, Naples and Romagna were seething with discontent. Parma, Piacenza, and Pavia in the North, Arcoli, Malpetra, and Chieti in the South, had been scenes of bloodshed. Nevertheless, in the luxurious harbours of life there was a tendency to discredit the journals, to judge them over-zealous in the concocting of a sensation. Tarsis gained the busy highway that leads toward Porta Ticinese. Passing a man he knew, he looked at him squarely to test the efficacy of his disguise; the other gave no sign of recognition, and he went on with renewed confidence. He was aware that the Milanese carried themselves with an odd mien to-night. There was a certain anxiety in the faces of some, notably the better-dressed class. Those who belonged to what is called the lower populace had a saucy, lightly defiant air; they walked with a swagger and stared the better-dressed out of countenance; some of the young men had in their gait the swing acquired by service in a regiment of Bersaglieri, but when they passed a conscript from the barracks they made sport of him.