They were on the field of Goito; it was won.  It was won against odds.  At Pastrengo they witnessed an encounter; this was a battle.  Vittoria perceived that there was the difference between a symphony and a lyric song.  The blessedness of the sensation that death can be light and easy dispossessed her of the meaner compassion, half made up of cowardice, which she had been nearly borne down by on the field of Pastrengo.  At an angle on a height off the left wing of the royal army the face of the battle was plain to her:  the movements of the troops were clear as strokes on a slate.  Laura flung her life into her eyes, and knelt and watched, without summing one sole thing from what her senses received.

Vittoria said, “We are too far away to understand it.”

“No,” said Laura, “we are too far away to feel it.”

The savage soul of the woman was robbed of its share of tragic emotion by having to hold so far aloof.  Flashes of guns were but flashes of guns up there where she knelt.  She thirsted to read the things written by them; thirsted for their mystic terrors, somewhat as souls of great prophets have craved for the full revelation of those fitful underlights which inspired their mouths.

Charles Albert’s star was at its highest when the Piedmontese drums beat for an advance of the whole line at Goito.

Laura stood up, white as furnace-fire.  “Women can do some good by praying,” she said.  She believed that she had been praying.  That was her part in the victory.

Rain fell as from the forehead of thunder.  From black eve to black dawn the women were among dead and dying men, where the lanterns trailed a slow flame across faces that took the light and let it go.  They returned to their carriage exhausted.  The ways were almost impassable for carriage-wheels.  While they were toiling on and exchanging their drenched clothes, Vittoria heard Merthyr’s voice speaking to Beppo on the box.  He was saying that Captain Gambier lay badly wounded; brandy was wanted for him.  She flung a cloak over Laura, and handed out the flask with a naked arm.  It was not till she saw him again that she remembered or even felt that he had kissed the arm.  A spot of sweet fire burned on it just where the soft fulness of a woman’s arm slopes to the bend.  He chid her for being on the field and rejoiced in a breath, for the carriage and its contents helped to rescue his wounded brother in arms from probable death.  Gambier, wounded in thigh and ankle by rifle-shot, was placed in the carriage.  His clothes were saturated with the soil of Goito; but wounded and wet, he smiled gaily, and talked sweet boyish English.  Merthyr gave the driver directions to wind along up the Mincio.  “Georgiana will be at the nearest village—­she has an instinct for battle-fields, or keeps spies in her pay,” he said.

“Tell her I am safe.  We march to cut them (the enemy) off from Verona, and I can’t leave.  The game is in our hands.  We shall give you Venice.”