“Yes,” she murmured, while she read his face for a shadow of a repulsion; “and, my friend, I cannot go to Italy now!”

Merthyr immediately drew a seat beside her.  He perceived that there would be no access to her reason, even as he was on the point of addressing it.

“Then all my care and trouble are to be thrown away?” he said, taking the short road to her feelings.

She put the hand that was disengaged softly on his shoulder.  “No; not thrown away.  Let me be what Merthyr wishes me to be!  That is my chief prayer.”

“Why, then, will you not do what Merthyr wishes you to do?”

Emilia’s eyelids shut, while her face still fronted him.

“Oh!  I will speak all out to you,” she cried.  “Merthyr, my friend, he came to kiss me once, before I have only just understood it!  He is going to Austria.  He came to touch me for the last time before his hand is red with my blood.  Stop him from going!  I am ready to follow you:—­I can hear of his marrying that woman:—­Oh!  I cannot live and think of him in that Austrian white coat.  Poor thing!—­my dear! my dear!” And she turned away her head.

It is not unnatural that Merthyr hearing these soft epithets, should disbelieve in the implied self-conquest of her preceding words.  He had no clue to make him guess that these were simply old exclamations of hers brought to her lips by the sorrowful contrast in her mind.

“It will be better that you should see him,” he said, with less of his natural sincerity; so soon are we corrupted by any suspicion that our egoism prompts.

“Here?” And she hung close to him, open-lipped, open-eyed, open-eared, as if (Georgiana would think it, thought Merthyr) her savage senses had laid the trap for this proposal, and now sprung up keen for their prey.  “Here, Merthyr?  Yes! let me see him.  You will!  Let me see him, for he cannot resist me.  He tries.  He thinks he does:  but he cannot.  I can stretch out my finger—­I can put it on the day when, if he has galloped one way he will gallop another.  Let him come.”

She held up both her hands in petition, half dropping her eyelids, with a shadowy beauty.

In Merthyr’s present view, the idea of Wilfrid being in ranks opposed to him was so little provocative of intense dissatisfaction, that it was out of his power to believe that Emilia craved to see him simply to dissuade the man from the obnoxious step.  “Ah, well!  See him; see him, if you must,” he said.  “Arrange it with my sister.”

He quitted the room, shrinking from the sound of her thanks, and still more from the consciousness of his torment.

The business that detained him was to get money for Marini.  Georgiana placed her fortune at his disposal a second time.  There was his own, which he deemed it no excess of chivalry to fling into the gulf.  The two sat together, arranging what property should be sold, and how they would share the sacrifice in common.  Georgiana pressed him to dispose of a little estate belonging to her, that money might immediately be raised.  They talked as they sat over the fire toward the dusk of the winter evening.