te of a perpetual repressive force).--Emilia looked at
him till she caught his eye: "I hope I shall never meet you there," she
said.

The colonel coloured, and drew his finger along each curve of his
moustache. The table was silent. Colonel Pierson was a gentleman, but
a false position and the irritating topic deprived him of proper
self-command.

"What would you do?" he said, not gallantly.

Emilia would have been glad to have been allowed to subside, but the
tone stung her.

"I could not do much; I am a woman," said she.

Whereto the colonel: "It's only the women who do anything over there."

"And that is why you flog them!"

The colonel, seeing himself surrounded by ladies, lost the right
guidance of his wits, at this point, reddened, and was saved by an Irish
outcry of horror from some unpleasant and possibly unmanly retort. "Mr.
Paricles said exactly the same. Oh, sir! do ye wear an officer's uniform
to go about behavin' in that shockin' way to poor helpless females?"

This was the first time Mrs. Chump had ever been found of service at the
Brookfield dining-table. Colonel Pierson joined the current smile, and
the matter passed.

He was affectionate with Wilfrid, and invited him to Verona, with the
assurance that his (the Austrian) school of cavalry was the best in
the world. "You beat us in pace and weight; but you can't skirmish, you
can't manage squadrons, and you know nothing of outpost duty," said the
colonel. Wilfrid promised to visit him some day: a fact he denied to
Emilia, when she charged him with it. Her brain seemed to be set on fire
by the presence of an Austrian officer. The miserable belief that
she had abandoned her country pressing on her remorsefully, she lost
appetite, briskness of eye, and the soft reddish-brown ripe blood-hue
that made her cheeks sweet to contemplate. She looked worn, small,
wretched: her very walk indicated self-contempt. Wilfrid was keen to see
the change for which others might have accused a temporary headache. Now
that she appeared under this blight, it seemed easier to give her
up; and his magnanimity being thus encouraged (I am not hard on
him--remember the constitution of love, in which a heart un-aroused is
pure selfishness, and a heart aroused heroic generosity; they being
one heart to outer life)--his magnanimity, I say, being under this
favourable sun, he said to himself that there should be an end of
double-dealing; and, possibly consoled by feeling a mar