“What would you do?” he said, not gallantly.

Emilia would have been glad to have been allowed to subside, but the tone stung her.

“I could not do much; I am a woman,” said she.

Whereto the colonel:  “It’s only the women who do anything over there.”

“And that is why you flog them!”

The colonel, seeing himself surrounded by ladies, lost the right guidance of his wits, at this point, reddened, and was saved by an Irish outcry of horror from some unpleasant and possibly unmanly retort.  “Mr. Paricles said exactly the same.  Oh, sir! do ye wear an officer’s uniform to go about behavin’ in that shockin’ way to poor helpless females?”

This was the first time Mrs. Chump had ever been found of service at the Brookfield dining-table.  Colonel Pierson joined the current smile, and the matter passed.

He was affectionate with Wilfrid, and invited him to Verona, with the assurance that his (the Austrian) school of cavalry was the best in the world.  “You beat us in pace and weight; but you can’t skirmish, you can’t manage squadrons, and you know nothing of outpost duty,” said the colonel.  Wilfrid promised to visit him some day:  a fact he denied to Emilia, when she charged him with it.  Her brain seemed to be set on fire by the presence of an Austrian officer.  The miserable belief that she had abandoned her country pressing on her remorsefully, she lost appetite, briskness of eye, and the soft reddish-brown ripe blood-hue that made her cheeks sweet to contemplate.  She looked worn, small, wretched:  her very walk indicated self-contempt.  Wilfrid was keen to see the change for which others might have accused a temporary headache.  Now that she appeared under this blight, it seemed easier to give her up; and his magnanimity being thus encouraged (I am not hard on him—­remember the constitution of love, in which a heart un-aroused is pure selfishness, and a heart aroused heroic generosity; they being one heart to outer life)—­his magnanimity, I say, being under this favourable sun, he said to himself that there should be an end of double-dealing; and, possibly consoled by feeling a martyr, he persuaded himself to act the gentle ruffian.  To which end, he was again absent from Brookfield, for a space, and bitterly missed.

Emilia, for the last two Sundays, had taken Mr. Barrett’s place at the organ.  She was playing the prelude to one of the evening hymns, when the lover, whose features she dreaded to be once more forgetting, appeared in the curtained enclosure.  A stoppage in the tune, and a prolonged squeal of the instrument, gave the congregation below matter to speculate upon.  Wilfrid put up his finger and sat reverently down, while Emilia plunged tremblingly at the note that was howling its life away.  And as she managed to swim into the stream of the sacred melody again, her head was turned toward her lover under a new sensation; and the first words she murmured were, “We have never been in church together, before.”