till Candida's marriage. During her
girlhood she had had to accept her mother's view of life: to shut
herself up in the tomb in which the poor woman brooded over her
martyrs. But that was not the girl's way of honoring the dead. At the
moment when the first shot was fired on Menotti's house she had been
reading Petrarch's Ode to the Lords of Italy, and the lines _l'antico
valor Ne Vitalici cor non e ancor morto_ had lodged like a bullet in
her brain. From the day of her marriage she began to take a share in
the silent work which was going on throughout Italy. Milan was at that
time the centre of the movement, and Candida Falco threw herself into
it with all the passion which her unhappy marriage left unsatisfied. At
first she had to act with great reserve, for her husband was a prudent
man, who did not care to have his habits disturbed by political
complications; but after his death there was nothing to restrain her,
except the exquisite tact which enabled her to work night and day in
the Italian cause without giving the Austrian authorities a pretext for
interference.

When I first knew Donna Candida, her mother was still living: a tragic
woman, prematurely bowed, like an image of death in the background of
the daughter's brilliant life. The Countess, since her son's death, had
become a patriot again, though in a narrower sense than Candida. The
mother's first thought was that her dead must be avenged, the
daughter's that Italy must be saved; but from different motives they
worked for the same end. Candida felt for the Countess that protecting
tenderness with which Italian children so often regard their parents, a
feeling heightened by the reverence which the mother's sufferings
inspired. Countess Verna, as the wife and mother of martyrs, had done
what Candida longed to do: she had given her utmost to Italy. There
must have been moments when the self-absorption of her grief chilled
her daughter's ardent spirit; but Candida revered in her mother the
image of their afflicted country.

"It was too terrible," she said, speaking of what the Countess had
suffered after Emilio's death. "All the circumstances were too
unmerciful. It seemed as if God had turned His face from my mother; as
if she had been singled out to suffer more than any of the others. All
the other families received some message or token of farewell from the
prisoners. One of them bribed the gaoler to carry a letter--another
sent a lock of hair by the chap