“Yes, health!” said Agostino.  “Is it health, do you think?  It’s the heart of the man! and a heart with a mill-stone about it—­a heart to breed a country from!  There stands the man who has faith in Italy, though she has been lying like a corpse for centuries.  God bless him!  He has no other comfort.  Viva l’Italia!”

The exclamation went up, and was acknowledged by him on the eminence overhanging them; but at a repetition of it his hand smote the air sideways.  They understood the motion, and were silent; while he, until Carlo breathed his name in his hearing, eyed the great scene stedfastly, with the absorbing simple passion of one who has endured long exile, and finds his clustered visions of it confronting the strange, beloved, visible life:—­the lake in the arms of giant mountains:  the far-spreading hazy plain; the hanging forests; the pointed crags; the gleam of the distant rose-shadowed snows that stretch for ever like an airy host, mystically clad, and baffling the eye as with the motions of a flight toward the underlying purple land.

CHAPTER II

He was a man of middle stature, thin, and even frail, as he stood defined against the sky; with the complexion of the student, and the student’s aspect.  The attentive droop of his shoulders and head, the straining of the buttoned coat across his chest, the air as of one who waited and listened, which distinguished his figure, detracted from the promise of other than contemplative energy, until his eyes were fairly seen and felt.  That is, until the observer became aware that those soft and large dark meditative eyes had taken hold of him.  In them lay no abstracted student’s languor, no reflex burning of a solitary lamp; but a quiet grappling force engaged the penetrating look.  Gazing upon them, you were drawn in suddenly among the thousand whirring wheels of a capacious and a vigorous mind, that was both reasoning and prompt, keen of intellect, acting throughout all its machinery, and having all under full command:  an orbed mind, supplying its own philosophy, and arriving at the sword-stroke by logical steps,—­a mind much less supple than a soldier’s; anything but the mind of a Hamlet.  The eyes were dark as the forest’s border is dark; not as night is dark.  Under favourable lights their colour was seen to be a deep rich brown, like the chestnut, or more like the hazeledged sunset brown which lies upon our western rivers in the winter floods, when night begins to shadow them.

The side-view of his face was an expression of classic beauty rarely now to be beheld, either in classic lands or elsewhere.  It was severe; the tender serenity of the full bow of the eyes relieved it.  In profile they showed little of their intellectual quality, but what some might have thought a playful luminousness, and some a quick pulse of feeling.  The chin was firm; on it, and on the upper lip, there was a clipped growth of black hair.  The whole