leg.  How intense is his faith to quacks! with what a passion of longing is he not seized to break somebody’s head!  They spoke of Italy in low voices.  “The time will come,” said she.  “And I shall be ready,” said he.  What rank was he to take in the liberating army?  Captain, colonel, general in chief, or simple private?  Here, as became him, he was much more positive and specific than she was:  Simple private, he said.  Yet he save himself caracoling on horseback.  Private in the cavalry, then, of course.  Private in the cavalry over-riding wrecks of Empires.  She looked forth under her brows with mournful indistinctness at that object in the distance.  They read Petrarch to get up the necessary fires.  Italia mia!  Vain indeed was this speaking to those thick and mortal wounds in her fair body, but their sighs went with the Tiber, the Arno, and the Po, and their hands joined.  Who has not wept for Italy?  I see the aspirations of a world arise for her, thick and frequent as the puffs of smoke from cigars of Pannonian sentries!

So when Austin came Richard said he could not leave Lady Judith, Lady Judith said she could not part with him.  For his sake, mind!  This Richard verified.  Perhaps he had reason to be grateful.  The high road of Folly may have led him from one that terminates worse.  Ho is foolish, God knows; but for my part I will not laugh at the hero because he has not got his occasion.  Meet him when he is, as it were, anointed by his occasion, and he is no laughing matter.

Richard felt his safety in this which, to please the world, we must term folly.  Exhalation of vapours was a wholesome process to him, and somebody who gave them shape and hue a beneficent Iris.  He told Austin plainly he could not leave her, and did not anticipate the day when he could.

“Why can’t you go to your wife, Richard?”

“For a reason you would be the first to approve, Austin.”

He welcomed Austin with every show of manly tenderness, and sadness at heart.  Austin he had always associated with his Lucy in that Hesperian palace of the West.  Austin waited patiently.  Lady Judith’s old lord played on all the baths in Nassau without evoking the tune of health.  Whithersoever he listed she changed her abode.  So admirable a wife was to be pardoned for espousing an old man.  She was an enthusiast even in her connubial duties.  She had the brows of an enthusiast.  With occasion she might have been a Charlotte Corday.  So let her also be shielded from the ban of ridicule.  Nonsense of enthusiasts is very different from nonsense of ninnies.  She was truly a high-minded person, of that order who always do what they see to be right, and always have confidence in their optics.  She was not unworthy of a young man’s admiration, if she was unfit to be his guide.  She resumed her ancient intimacy with Austin easily, while she preserved her new footing with Richard.  She and Austin were not unlike, only Austin never dreamed, and had not married an old lord.