's head! They spoke of Italy in low voices. "The time will come,"
said she. "And I shall be ready," said he. What rank was he to take in
the liberating army? Captain, colonel, general in chief, or simple
private? Here, as became him, he was much more positive and specific than
she was: Simple private, he said. Yet he save himself caracoling on
horseback. Private in the cavalry, then, of course. Private in the
cavalry over-riding wrecks of Empires. She looked forth under her brows
with mournful indistinctness at that object in the distance. They read
Petrarch to get up the necessary fires. Italia mia! Vain indeed was this
speaking to those thick and mortal wounds in her fair body, but their
sighs went with the Tiber, the Arno, and the Po, and their hands joined.
Who has not wept for Italy? I see the aspirations of a world arise for
her, thick and frequent as the puffs of smoke from cigars of Pannonian
sentries!

So when Austin came Richard said he could not leave Lady Judith, Lady
Judith said she could not part with him. For his sake, mind! This Richard
verified. Perhaps he had reason to be grateful. The high road of Folly
may have led him from one that terminates worse. Ho is foolish, God
knows; but for my part I will not laugh at the hero because he has not
got his occasion. Meet him when he is, as it were, anointed by his
occasion, and he is no laughing matter.

Richard felt his safety in this which, to please the world, we must term
folly. Exhalation of vapours was a wholesome process to him, and somebody
who gave them shape and hue a beneficent Iris. He told Austin plainly he
could not leave her, and did not anticipate the day when he could.

"Why can't you go to your wife, Richard?"

"For a reason you would be the first to approve, Austin."

He welcomed Austin with every show of manly tenderness, and sadness at
heart. Austin he had always associated with his Lucy in that Hesperian
palace of the West. Austin waited patiently. Lady Judith's old lord
played on all the baths in Nassau without evoking the tune of health.
Whithersoever he listed she changed her abode. So admirable a wife was to
be pardoned for espousing an old man. She was an enthusiast even in her
connubial duties. She had the brows of an enthusiast. With occasion she
might have been a Charlotte Corday. So let her also be shielded from the
ban of ridicule. Nonsense of enthusiasts is very different from nonsense
of ninnies. She was truly a high-minde