The recent scene concerned chiefly the actors who had moved onward:  it had touched Emilia but lightly, and him not at all.  But, while he magnified the glory of her singing, the imperishable note she had sounded this night, and the power and the triumph that would be hers, Emilia’s bosom began to heave, and she checked him with a storm of tears.  “Triumph! yes! what is this I have done?  Oh, Merthyr, my, true hero!  He praises me and knows nothing of how false I have been to you.  I am a slave!  I have sold myself—­sold myself!” She dropped her face in her hands, broken with grief.  “He fights,” she pursued; “he fights for my country.  I feel his blood—­it seems to run from my body as it runs from his.  Not if he is dying—­I dare not go to him if he is dying!  I am in chains.  I have sworn it for money.  See what a different man Merthyr is from any on earth!  Would he shoot himself for a woman?  Would he grow meaner the more he loved her?  My hero! my hero! and Tracy, my friend! what is my grief now?  Merthyr is my hero, but I hear him—­I hear him speaking it into my ears with his own lips, that I do not love him.  And it is true.  I never should have sold myself for three weary years away from him, if I had loved him.  I know it now it is done.  I thought more of my poor friends and Wilfrid, than of Merthyr, who bleeds for my country!  And he will not spurn me when we meet.  Yes, if he lives, he will come to me gentle as a ghost that has seen God!”

She abandoned herself to weeping.  Tracy, in a tender reverence for one who could speak such solemn matter spontaneously, supported her, and felt her tears as a rain of flame on his heart.

The nightingales were mute.  Not a sound was heard from bough or brake.

CHAPTER LIX

A wreck from the last Lombard revolt landed upon our shores in June.  His right arm was in a sling, and his Italian servant following him, kept close by his side, with a ready hand, as if fearing that at any moment the wounded gentleman’s steps might fail.  There was no public war going on just then:  for which reason he was eyed suspiciously by the rest of the passengers making their way up the beach; who seemed to entertain an impression that he had no business at such a moment to be crippled, and might be put down as one of those foreign fools who stand out for a trifle as targets to fools a little luckier than themselves.  Here, within our salt girdle, flourishes common sense.  We cherish life; we abhor bloodshed; we have no sympathy with your juvenile points of honour:  we are, in short, a civilized people; and seeing that Success has made us what we are, we advise other nations to succeed, or be quiet.  Of all of which the gravely-smiling gentleman appeared well aware; for, with an eye that courted none, and a perfectly calm face, he passed through the crowd, only once availing himself of his brown-faced Beppo’s spontaneously depressed