not take the nurse
from her family; I could not remove Angelo, without immense difficulty
and risk. It is singular, how everything has worked to give me more
and more sorrow. Could I but have remained in peace, cherishing the
messenger dove, I should have asked no more, but should have felt
overpaid for all the pains and bafflings of my sad and broken life."
In March, she flies back to Rieti, and finds "our treasure in the best
of health, and plump, though small. When first I took him in my arms,
he made no sound, but leaned his head against my bosom, and kept it
there, as if he would say, How could you leave me? They told me, that
all the day of my departure he would not be comforted, always looking
toward the door. He has been a strangely precocious infant, I think,
through sympathy with me, for I worked very hard before his birth,
with the hope that all my spirit might be incarnated in him. In
that regard, it may have been good for him to be with these more
instinctively joyous natures. I see that he is more serene, is less
sensitive, than when with me, and sleeps better. The most solid
happiness I have known has been when he has gone to sleep in my arms.
What cruel sacrifices have I made to guard my secret for the present,
and to have the mode of disclosure at my own option! It will, indeed,
be just like all the rest, if these sacrifices are made in vain."

* * * * *

At Rieti, Margaret rested till the middle of April, when, returning
once more to Rome, she was, as we have seen, shut up within the
beleagured city.

The siege ended, the anxious mother was free to seek her child once
more, in his nest among the mountains. Her fears had been but too
prophetic. "Though the physician sent me reassuring letters," she
writes, "I yet often seemed to hear Angelino calling to me amid the
roar of the cannon, and always his tone was of crying. And when I
came, I found mine own fast waning to the tomb! His nurse, lovely and
innocent as she appeared, had betrayed him, for lack of a few _scudi_!
He was worn to a skeleton; his sweet, childish grace all gone!
Everything I had endured seemed light to what I felt when I saw him
too weak to smile, or lift his wasted little hand. Now, by incessant
care, we have brought him back,--who knows if that be a deed of
love?--into this hard world once more. But I could not let him go,
unless I went with him; and I do hope that the cruel law of my life
will, at