lain. But Emilio made no sign, sent no
word. My mother felt as though he had turned his back on us. She used
to sit for hours, saying again and again, 'Why was he the only one to
forget his mother?' I tried to comfort her, but it was useless: she had
suffered too much. Now I never reason with her; I listen, and let her
ease her poor heart. Do you know, she still asks me sometimes if I
think he may have left a letter--if there is no way of finding out if
he left one? She forgets that I have tried again and again: that I have
sent bribes and messages to the gaoler, the chaplain, to every one who
came near him. The answer is always the same--no one has ever heard of
a letter. I suppose the poor boy was stunned, and did not think of
writing. Who knows what was passing through his poor bewildered brain?
But it would have been a great help to my mother to have a word from
him. If I had known how to imitate his writing I should have forged a
letter."

I knew enough of the Italians to understand how her boy's silence must
have aggravated the Countess's grief. Precious as a message from a
dying son would be to any mother, such signs of tenderness have to the
Italians a peculiar significance. The Latin race is rhetorical: it
possesses the gift of death-bed eloquence, the knack of saying the
effective thing on momentous occasions. The letters which the Italian
patriots sent home from their prisons or from the scaffold are not the
halting farewells that anguish would have wrung from a less expressive
race: they are veritable "compositions," saved from affectation only by
the fact that fluency and sonority are a part of the Latin inheritance.
Such letters, passed from hand to hand among the bereaved families,
were not only a comfort to the survivors but an incentive to fresh
sacrifices. They were the "seed of the martyrs" with which Italy was
being sown; and I knew what it meant to the Countess Verna to have no
such treasure in her bosom, to sit silent while other mothers quoted
their sons' last words.

I said just now that it was an unlucky day for me when I fell in love
with Donna Candida; and no doubt you have guessed the reason. She was
in love with some one else. It was the old situation of Heine's song.
That other loved another--loved Italy, and with an undivided passion.
His name was Fernando Briga, and at that time he was one of the
foremost liberals in Italy. He came of a middle-class Modenese family.
His father was a doc