t sounds for preparations for an attack on the house.
Sometimes, less alarmed on her own account, she thought of poor wounded
Orso, who was probably lying on the cold earth, with no help beyond what
she might expect from a bandit's charity. She fancied him covered with
blood, and writhing in hideous suffering; and the extraordinary thing
was that whenever Orso's image rose up before her mind's eye, she always
beheld him as she had seen him when he rode away, pressing the talisman
she had bestowed upon him to his lips. Then she mused over his courage.
She told herself he had exposed himself to the frightful danger he had
just escaped on her account, just for the sake of seeing her a little
sooner. A very little more, and she would have persuaded herself that
Orso had earned his broken arm in her defence! She reproached herself
with being the cause of his wound. But she admired him for it all the
more, and if that celebrated right and left was not so splendid a feat
in her sight as in Brandolaccio's or Colomba's, still she was convinced
few heroes of romance could ever had behaved with such intrepidity and
coolness, in so dangerous a pinch.

Her room was that usually occupied by Colomba. Above a kind of oaken
_prie-dieu_, and beside a sprig of blessed palm, a little miniature of
Orso, in his sub-lieutenant's uniform, hung on the wall. Miss Nevil took
the portrait down, looked at it for a long time, and laid it at last on
the table by her bed, instead of hanging it up again in its place.
She did not fall asleep till daybreak, and when she woke the sun
had travelled high above the horizon. In front of her bed she beheld
Colomba, waiting, motionless, till she should open her eyes.

"Well, dear lady, are you not very uncomfortable in this poor house of
ours?" said Colomba to her. "I fear you have hardly slept at all."

"Have you any news, dear friend?" cried Miss Nevil, sitting up in bed.

Her eye fell on Orso's picture, and she hastily tossed her handkerchief
upon it.

"Yes, I have news," said Colomba, with a smile.

Then she took up the picture.

"Do you think it like him? He is better looking than that!"

"Really," stammered Miss Nevil, quite confused, "I took down that
picture in a fit of absence! I have a horrid habit of touching
everything and never putting anything back! How is your brother?"

"Fairly well. Giocanto came here before four o'clock this morning. He
brought me a letter for you, Miss Lydia. Orso ha