“I remain here to nurse our dear friend Merthyr.  For that reason I am absent from your mother.  It is her desire that we should be married.

“Soon, soon, my own soul!

“I seem to be hanging on a tree for you, swayed by such a teazing wind.

“Oh, soon! or I feel that I shall hate any vestige of will that I have in this head of mine.  Not in the heart—­it is not there!

“And sometimes I am burning to sing.  The voice leaps to my lips; it is quite like a thing that lives apart—­my prisoner.

“It is true, Laura is here with Merthyr.

“Could you come at once?—­not here, but to Pallanza?  We shall both make our mother happy.  This she wishes, this she lives for, this consoles her—­and oh, this gives me peace!  Yes, Merthyr is recovering!  I can leave him without the dread I had; and Laura confesses to the feminine sentiment, if her funny jealousy of a rival nurse is really simply feminine.  She will be glad of our resolve, I am sure.  And then you will order all my actions; and I shall be certain that they are such as I would proudly call mine; and I shall be shut away from the world.  Yes; let it be so!  Addio.  I reserve all sweet names for you.  Addio.  In Pallanza:—­no not Pallanza—­Paradise!

“Hush! and do not smile at me:—­it was not my will, I discover, but my want of will, that distracted me.

“See my last signature of—­not Vittoria; for I may sign that again and still be Emilia Alessandra Ammiani.

“SandraBelloni”

The letter was sealed; Luigi bore it away, and a brief letter to Countess Ammiani, in Pallanza, as well.

Vittoria was relieved of her anxiety concerning Merthyr by the arrival of Georgiana, who had been compelled to make her way round by Piacenza and Turin, where she had left Gambier, with Beppo in attendance on him.  Georgiana at once assumed all the duties of head-nurse, and the more resolutely because of her brother’s evident moral weakness in sighing for the hand of a fickle girl to smooth his pillow.  “When he is stronger you can sit beside him a little,” she said to Vittoria, who surrendered her post without a struggle, and rarely saw him, though Laura told her that his frequent exclamation was her name, accompanied by a soft look at his sister—­“which would have stirred my heart like poor old Milan last March,” Laura added, with a lift of her shoulders.

Georgiana’s icy manner appeared infinitely strange to Vittoria when she heard from Merthyr that his sister had become engaged to Captain Gambier.

“Nothing softens these women,” said Laura, putting Georgiana in a class.

“I wish you could try the effect of your winning Merthyr,” Vittoria suggested.

“I remember that when I went to my husband, I likewise wanted every woman of my acquaintance to be married.”  Laura sighed deeply.  “What is this poor withered body of mine now?  It feels like an old volcano, cindery, with fire somewhere:—­a charming bride!  My dear, if I live till my children make me a grandmother, I shall look on the love of men and women as a toy that I have played with.  A new husband?  I must be dragged through the Circles of Dante before I can conceive it, and then I should loathe the stranger.”