e.

"What will it mean?" she said.

"That we are quits, I presume; and that we bear no malice. At any rate,
that I relinquish the field. I like a hand that can deal a good stroke.
I conceived you to be a mere little romantic person, and correct my
mistake. You win the prize, you see."

"You would have made him an Austrian, and he is now safe from that. I
win nothing more," said Emilia.

When Tracy and Emilia stood alone, he cried out in a rapture of praise,
"Now I know what a power you have. You may bid me live or die."

The recent scene concerned chiefly the actors who had moved onward:
it had touched Emilia but lightly, and him not at all. But, while
he magnified the glory of her singing, the imperishable note she had
sounded this night, and the power and the triumph that would be hers,
Emilia's bosom began to heave, and she checked him with a storm of
tears. "Triumph! yes! what is this I have done? Oh, Merthyr, my true
hero! He praises me and knows nothing of how false I have been to you.
I am a slave! I have sold myself--sold myself!" She dropped her face in
her hands, broken with grief. "He fights," she pursued; "he fights for
my country. I feel his blood--it seems to run from my body as it runs
from his. Not if he is dying--I dare not go to him if he is dying! I am
in chains. I have sworn it for money. See what a different man Merthyr
is from any on earth! Would he shoot himself for a woman? Would he grow
meaner the more he loved her? My hero! my hero! and Tracy, my friend!
what is my grief now? Merthyr is my hero, but I hear him--I hear him
speaking it into my ears with his own lips, that I do not love him. And
it is true. I never should have sold myself for three weary years away
from him, if I had loved him. I know it now it is done. I thought more
of my poor friends and Wilfrid, than of Merthyr, who bleeds for my
country! And he will not spurn me when we meet. Yes, if he lives, he
will come to me gentle as a ghost that has seen God!"

She abandoned herself to weeping. Tracy, in a tender reverence for one
who could speak such solemn matter spontaneously, supported her, and
felt her tears as a rain of flame on his heart.

The nightingales were mute. Not a sound was heard from bough or brake.

CHAPTER LIX

A wreck from the last Lombard revolt landed upon our shores in June. His
right arm was in a sling, and his Italian servant following him, kept
close by his side, with a ready hand, as if fearing