. Or it was perhaps merely
because, as the failure of Colonel Alingdon's sight cut him off from
his work, he felt the natural inclination of age to revert from the
empty present to the crowded past. For one cause or another he _did_
talk to me in the last year of his life; and I felt myself mingled, to
an extent inconceivable to the mere reader of history, with the
passionate scenes of the Italian struggle for liberty. Colonel Alingdon
had been mixed with it in all its phases: he had known the last
Carbonari and the Young Italy of Mazzini; he had been in Perugia when
the mercenaries of a liberal Pope slaughtered women and children in the
streets; he had been in Sicily with the Thousand, and in Milan during
the _Cinque Giornate_.

"They say the Italians didn't know how to fight," he said one day,
musingly--"that the French had to come down and do their work for them.
People forget how long it was since they had had any fighting to do.
But they hadn't forgotten how to suffer and hold their tongues; how to
die and take their secrets with them. The Italian war of independence
was really carried on underground: it was one of those awful silent
struggles which are so much more terrible than the roar of a battle.
It's a deuced sight easier to charge with your regiment than to lie
rotting in an Austrian prison and know that if you give up the name of
a friend or two you can go back scot-free to your wife and children.
And thousands and thousands of Italians had the choice given them--and
hardly one went back."

He sat silent, his meditative fingertips laid together, his eyes fixed
on the past which was the now only thing clearly visible to them.

"And the women?" I said. "Were they as brave as the men?"

I had not spoken quite at random. I had always heard that there had
been as much of love as of war in Colonel Alingdon's early career, and
I hoped that my question might give a personal turn to his
reminiscences.

"The women?" he repeated. "They were braver--for they had more to bear
and less to do. Italy could never have been saved without them."

His eye had kindled and I detected in it the reflection of some vivid
memory. It was then that I asked him what was the bravest thing he had
ever known of a woman's doing.

The question was such a vague one that I hardly knew why I had put it,
but to my surprise he answered almost at once, as though I had touched
on a subject of frequent meditation.

"The bravest thing I ev