side, and when at times she saw the hopeless effort of his hand to reach to hers, or during the long still hours she laid her head on his pillow, and knew that he breathed gratefully.  The sweetness of helping him, and of making his breathing pleasant to him, closed much of the world which lay beyond her windows to her thoughts, and surprised her with an unknown emotion, so strange to her that when it first swept up her veins she had the fancy of her having been touched by a supernatural hand, and heard a flying accord of instruments.  She was praying before she knew what prayer was.  A crucifix hung over Merthyr’s head.  She had looked on it many times, and looked on it still, without seeing more than the old sorrow.  In the night it was dim.  She found herself trying to read the features of the thorn-crowned Head in the solitary night.  She and it were alone with a life that was faint above the engulphing darkness.  She prayed for the life, and trembled, and shed tears, and would have checked them; they seemed to be bearing away her little remaining strength.  The tears streamed.  No answer was given to her question, “Why do I weep?” She wept when Merthyr had passed the danger, as she had wept when the hours went by, with shrouded visages; and though she felt the difference m the springs of her tears, she thought them but a simple form of weakness showing shade and light.

These tears were a vanward wave of the sea to follow; the rising of her voice to heaven was no more than a twitter of the earliest dawn before the coming of her soul’s outcry.

“I have had a weeping fit,” she thought, and resolved to remember it tenderly, as being associated with her friend’s recovery, and a singular masterful power absolutely to look on the Austrians marching up the streets of Milan, and not to feel the surging hatred, or the nerveless despair, which she had supposed must be her alternatives.

It is a mean image to say that the entry of the Austrians into the reconquered city was like a river of oil permeating a lake of vinegar, but it presents the fact in every sense.  They demanded nothing more than submission, and placed a gentle foot upon the fallen enemy; and wherever they appeared they were isolated.  The deepest wrath of the city was, nevertheless, not directed against them, but against Carlo Alberto, who had pledged his honour to defend it, and had forsaken it.  Vittoria committed a public indiscretion on the day when the king left Milan to its fate:  word whereof was conveyed to Carlo Ammiani, and he wrote to her.

“It is right that I should tell you what I have heard,” the letter said.  “I have heard that my bride drove up to the crowned traitor, after he had unmasked himself, and when he was quitting the Greppi palace, and that she kissed his hand before the people—­poor bleeding people of Milan!  This is what I hear in the Val d’Intelvi:—­that she despised the misery and just anger of the people,