r in what he believed to be the army of Italy.
We used to fence together every day for two hours.'

'I love the fathers who do that,' said Vittoria.

After such speaking Ammiani was not capable of the attempt to preach
peace and safety to her. He postponed it to the next minute and the
next.

Vittoria's spirit was in one of those angry knots which are half of the
intellect, half of the will, and are much under the domination of one or
other of the passions in the ascendant. She was resolved to go forward;
she felt justified in going forward; but the divine afflatus of
enthusiasm buoyed her no longer, and she required the support of all
that accuracy of insight and that senseless stubbornness which there
might be in her nature. The feeling that it was she to whom it was given
to lift the torch and plant the standard of Italy, had swept her as
through the strings of a harp. Laura, and the horrible little bronze
butterfly, and the 'Sei sospetta,' now made her duty seem dry and
miserably fleshless, imaging itself to her as if a skeleton had been
told to arise and walk:--say, the thing obeys, and fills a ghastly
distension of men's eyelids for a space, and again lies down, and men
get their breath: but who is the rosier for it? where is the glory of
it? what is the good? This Milan, and Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Brescia,
Venice, Florence, the whole Venetian, Tuscan, and Lombardic lands, down
to far Sicily, and that Rome which always lay under the crown of a dead
sunset in her idea--they too might rise; but she thought of them as
skeletons likewise. Even the shadowy vision of Italy Free had no
bloom on it, and stood fronting the blown trumpets of resurrection
Lazarus-like.

At these moments young hearts, though full of sap and fire, cannot do
common nursing labour for the little suckling sentiments and hopes,
the dreams, the languors and the energies hanging about them for
nourishment. Vittoria's horizon was within five feet of her. She saw
neither splendid earth nor ancient heaven; nothing save a breach to
be stepped over in defiance of foes and (what was harder to brave) of
friends. Some wayward activity of old associations set her humming a
quaint English tune, by which she was brought to her consciousness.

'Dear friend,' she said, becoming aware that there might be a more
troubled depth in Ammiani's absence of speech than in her own.

'Yes?' said he, quickly, as for a sentence to follow. None came, and he
continued,