Countess Ammiani wrote brief letters from Luino and Pallanza on Lago Maggiore.  She said that Carlo was in the Como mountains; he would expect to find his bride, and would accuse his mother; “but his mother will be spared those reproaches,” she added, “if the last shot fired kills, as it generally does, the bravest and the dearest.”

“If it should!”—­the thought rose on a quick breath in Vittoria’s bosom, and the sentiment which held her away dispersed like a feeble smoke, and showed her another view of her features.  She wept with longing for love and dependence.  She was sick of personal freedom, tired of the exercise of her will, only too eager to give herself to her beloved.  The blessedness of marriage, of peace and dependence, came on her imagination like a soft breeze from a hidden garden, like sleep.  But this very longing created the resistance to it in the depths of her soul.  ’There was a light as of reviving life, or of pain comforted, when it was she who was sitting by Merthyr’s 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.