to the thought, as you were an army of deliverance. For you are Hope.
You know not Despair. You are Hope. And you love as myself a mother
whose son you are not! 'Oh!' is Giulia's cry, 'will our Italy reward
him with a daughter?'--the noblest that we have. Yes, for she would be
Italian always through you. We pray that you may not get old too soon,
before she grows for you and is found, only that you may know in her our
love. See! I am brought to talk this language. The woman is in me."

Merthyr said, as he read this, "I could wish no better." His feeling for
Emilia waxed toward a self-avowal as she advanced to womanhood; and
the last stage of it had struck among trembling strings in the inmost
chambers of his heart. That last stage of it--her passionate claiming
of Wilfrid before two women, one her rival--slept like a covered furnace
within him. "Can you remember none of her words?" he said more than once
to Georgiana, who replied: "I would try to give you an idea of what she
said, but I might as well try to paint lightning."

"'My lover'?" suggested Merthyr.

"Oh, yes; that she said."

"It sounded oddly to your ears?"

"Very, indeed."

"What more?"

"--did she say, do you mean?"

"Is my poor sister ashamed to repeat it?"

"I would repeat anything that would give you pleasure to hear."

"Sometimes pain, you know, is sweet."

Little by little, and with a contest at each step, Georgiana coasted the
conviction that her undivided reign was over. Then she judged Emilia by
human nature's hardest standard: the measure of the qualities brought as
usurper and successor. Unconsciously she placed herself in the seat
of one who had fulfilled all the great things demanded of a woman
for Merthyr, and it seemed to her that Emilia exercised some fatal
fascination, girl though she was, to hurl her from that happy
sovereignty.

But Emilia's worst crime before the arraigning lady was that Wilfrid had
cast her off. Female justice, therefore, said: "You must be unworthy
of my brother;" and female delicacy thought: "You have been soiled by
a previous history." She had pitied Wilfrid: now she held him partially
blameless: and while love was throbbing in many pulses all round her.
The man she had seen besieged by passionate love, touched her cold
imagination with a hue of fire, as Winter dawn lies on a frosty field.
She almost conceived what this other, not sisterly, love might be;
though not as its victim, by any means. She beca