y 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.

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 noth