out it at home. So that's
so much to the good.

"Indeed, I'll come back to you soon, you poor, forsaken, old thing! But
Julie has no one in the world, and I feel like a Newfoundland dog who
has pulled some one out of the water. The water was deep; and the life's
only just coming back; and the dog's not much good. But he sits there,
for company, till the doctor comes, and that's just what I'm doing.

"I know you don't approve of the notions I have in my head now. But
that's because you don't understand. Why don't you come out and join us?
Then you'd like Julie as much as I do; everything would be quite simple;
and I shouldn't be in the least jealous.

"Dr. Meredith is coming here, probably to-night, and Jacob should arrive
to-morrow on his way to Venice, where poor Chudleigh and his boy are."

* * * * *

The _breva_, or fair-weather wind, from the north was blowing freshly
yet softly down the lake. The afternoon sun was burning on Bellaggio, on
the long terrace of the Melzi villa, on the white mist of fruit-blossom
that lay lightly on the green slopes above San Giovanni.

Suddenly the Duchess and the boatman left the common topics of every day
by which the Duchess was trying to improve her Italian--such as the
proposed enlargement of the Bellevue Hotel, the new villas that were
springing up, the gardens of the Villa Carlotta, and so forth. Evelyn
had carelessly asked the old man whether he had been in any of the
fighting of '59, and in an instant, under her eyes, he became another
being. Out rolled a torrent of speech; the oars lay idly on the water;
and through the man's gnarled and wrinkled face there blazed a high and
illumining passion. Novara and its beaten king, in '49; the ten years of
waiting, when a whole people bode its time, in a gay, grim silence; the
grudging victory of Magenta; the fivefold struggle that wrenched the
hills of San Martino from the Austrians; the humiliations and the rage
of Villafranca--of all these had this wasted graybeard made a part. And
he talked of them with the Latin eloquence and facility, as no veteran
of the north could have talked; he was in a moment the equal of these
great affairs in which he had mingled; so that one felt in him the son
of a race which had been rolled and polished--a pebble, as it were, from
rocks which had made the primeval frame-work of the world--in the main
course and stream of history.

Then from the campaign of '59 he