be?  I know not!  So will this your Emilia be in the time that comes to the young people, she has this, as you say, malady very strong—­ma, ogni male ha la sua ricetta; I can say it of persons.  Of nations to think my heart is as an infidel—­very heavy.  Ah! till I turn to you—­who revive to the thought, as you were an army of deliverance.  For you are Hope.  You know not Despair.  You are Hope.  And you love as myself a mother whose son you are not!  ‘Oh!’ is Giulia’s cry, ’will our Italy reward him with a daughter?’—­the noblest that we have.  Yes, for she would be Italian always through you.  We pray that you may not get old too soon, before she grows for you and is found, only that you may know in her our love.  See!  I am brought to talk this language.  The woman is in me.”

Merthyr said, as he read this, “I could wish no better.”  His feeling for Emilia waxed toward a self-avowal as she advanced to womanhood; and the last stage of it had struck among trembling strings in the inmost chambers of his heart.  That last stage of it—­her passionate claiming of Wilfrid before two women, one her rival—­slept like a covered furnace within him.  “Can you remember none of her words?” he said more than once to Georgiana, who replied:  “I would try to give you an idea of what she said, but I might as well try to paint lightning.”

“’My lover’?” suggested Merthyr.

“Oh, yes; that she said.”

“It sounded oddly to your ears?”

“Very, indeed.”

“What more?”

“—­did she say, do you mean?”

“Is my poor sister ashamed to repeat it?”

“I would repeat anything that would give you pleasure to hear.”

“Sometimes pain, you know, is sweet.”

Little by little, and with a contest at each step, Georgiana coasted the conviction that her undivided reign was over.  Then she judged Emilia by human nature’s hardest standard:  the measure of the qualities brought as usurper and successor.  Unconsciously she placed herself in the seat of one who had fulfilled all the great things demanded of a woman for Merthyr, and it seemed to her that Emilia exercised some fatal fascination, girl though she was, to hurl her from that happy sovereignty.

But Emilia’s worst crime before the arraigning lady was that Wilfrid had cast her off.  Female justice, therefore, said:  “You must be unworthy of my brother;” and female delicacy thought:  “You have been soiled by a previous history.”  She had pitied Wilfrid:  now she held him partially blameless:  and while love was throbbing in many pulses all round her.  The man she had seen besieged by passionate love, touched her cold imagination with a hue of fire, as Winter dawn lies on a frosty field.  She almost conceived what this other, not sisterly, love might be; though not as its victim, by any means.  She became, as she had never before been, spiritually tormented and restless.  The thought framed itself