Colonel Pierson paid his promised visit, on his way back to his quarters at Verona.  His stay was shortened by rumours of anticipated troubles in Italy.  One day at table he chanced to observe, speaking of the Milanese, that they required another lesson, and that it would save the shedding of blood if, annually, the chief men of the city took a flogging for the community (senseless arrogance that sensible, and even kindly, men will sometimes be tempted to utter, and prompted to act on, in that deteriorating state of a perpetual repressive force).—­Emilia looked at him till she caught his eye:  “I hope I shall never meet you there,” she said.

The colonel coloured, and drew his finger along each curve of his moustache.  The table was silent.  Colonel Pierson was a gentleman, but a false position and the irritating topic deprived him of proper self-command.

“What would you do?” he said, not gallantly.

Emilia would have been glad to have been allowed to subside, but the tone stung her.

“I could not do much; I am a woman,” said she.

Whereto the colonel:  “It’s only the women who do anything over there.”

“And that is why you flog them!”

The colonel, seeing himself surrounded by ladies, lost the right guidance of his wits, at this point, reddened, and was saved by an Irish outcry of horror from some unpleasant and possibly unmanly retort.  “Mr. Paricles said exactly the same.  Oh, sir! do ye wear an officer’s uniform to go about behavin’ in that shockin’ way to poor helpless females?”

This was the first time Mrs. Chump had ever been found of service at the Brookfield dining-table.  Colonel Pierson joined the current smile, and the matter passed.

He was affectionate with Wilfrid, and invited him to Verona, with the assurance that his (the Austrian) school of cavalry was the best in the world.  “You beat us in pace and weight; but you can’t skirmish, you can’t manage squadrons, and you know nothing of outpost duty,” said the colonel.  Wilfrid promised to visit him some day:  a fact he denied to Emilia, when she charged him with it.  Her brain seemed to be set on fire by the presence of an Austrian officer.  The miserable belief that she had abandoned her country pressing on her remorsefully, she lost appetite, briskness of eye, and the soft reddish-brown ripe blood-hue that made her cheeks sweet to contemplate.  She looked worn, small, wretched:  her very walk indicated self-contempt.  Wilfrid was keen to see the change for which others might have accused a temporary headache.  Now that she appeared under this blight, it seemed easier to give her up; and his magnanimity being thus encouraged (I am not hard on him—­remember the constitution of love, in which a heart un-aroused is pure selfishness, and a heart aroused heroic generosity; they being one heart to outer life)—­his magnanimity, I say, being under this favourable sun, he said to himself that there should be an end of double-dealing; and, possibly consoled by feeling a martyr, he persuaded himself to act the gentle ruffian.  To which end, he was again absent from Brookfield, for a space, and bitterly missed.