ep! How often that noble and
beautiful lady, as she sat alone with her boys, had let her tears fall
in silent reproach of the man who had sacrificed wife, children,
fortune, in a feverish pursuit of shadows. Yes, of shadows; for what
was it that urged him on but the obstinate pride, the ambition, the
vindictiveness, which in the beginning are often associated with
patriotism and in the end are apt to become its masters? Giuseppe
Mansana understood this as he thought over his own case and that of
hundreds of others who passed in review before his mind.

The music clashed, the cannon thundered, the air was heavy with flowers
and quivering with "Evvivas" in honour of his dead father's memory.

And yet, thought the son, what an empty, sterile life it had been after
all. Plot and prison, prison and plot; with mother, wife, children,
left to want, family estates sold, and nothing gained but the unquiet
heart's alternations from suffering to revenge, from revenge to
suffering again! And _that_, he mused, was my legacy from him: the
suffering, the hatred, and with it all the vacant, unfulfilled life.

Close round him gathered the elder Mansana's old companions; they
clasped his hand, they congratulated him on the honours paid to his
father; they heaped praises on himself as one worthy to inherit a
tradition so glorious.

And still his thoughts ran on. Yes, my life has been as hollow as his.
The fierce joy of vengeance while the war lasted; when it ended a
restless striving after adventure, a vain ambition, a proud sense of
invincible success, took possession of my life--brutal, self-absorbed,
hollow, all of it. And he vowed that henceforward his comrades should
have something else to talk about besides the latest wild exploit of
Giuseppe Mansana; and that he would keep before his mind a nobler
ambition than the haughty satisfaction he derived from the
consciousness that, whatever his own achievements might be, he never
spoke of them or of himself.

As they drew nearer his father's native town, the demonstrations became
more animated, and larger crowds poured forth to gaze at Giuseppe
Mansana, the dead hero's son, already well known by reputation. But to
that son himself, as he passed through the familiar haunts of his
boyish days, it seemed as if he could perceive the figure of his
grandmother sitting by the roadside and throwing stones at the
procession as it went by. He could almost fancy the old woman aiming,
in her im