ething to think of during the last three weeks," said
Vittoria, touching him kindly on the arm.

The confectioner lifted his fingers and his big brown eyes after them,
expressive of the unutterable thoughts. He informed her that he had laid
in a stock of flour, in the expectation that Carlo Alberto would defend
the city: The Milanese were ready to aid him, though some, as Zotti
confessed, had ceased to effervesce; and a great number who were
perfectly ready to fight regarded his tardy appeal to Italian patriotism
very coldly. Zotti set out in person to discover Giacinta. The girl
could hardly fetch her breath when she saw her mistress. She was in
Laura's service, and said that Laura had brought a wounded Englishman
from the field of Custozza. Vittoria hurried to Laura, with whom she
found Merthyr, blue-white as a corpse, having been shot through the
body. His sister was in one of the Lombard hamlets, unaware of his fall;
Beppo had been sent to her.

They noticed one another's embrowned complexions, but embraced silently.
"Twice widowed!" Laura said when they sat together. Laura hushed all
speaking of the war or allusion to a single incident of the miserable
campaign, beyond the bare recital of Vittoria's adventures; yet when
Vicenza by chance was mentioned, she burst out: "They are not cities,
they are living shrieks. They have been made impious for ever. Burn them
to ashes, that they may not breathe foul upon heaven!" She had clung to
the skirts of the army as far as the field of Custozza. "He," she said,
pointing to the room where Merthyr lay,--"he groans less than the others
I have nursed. Generally, when they looked at me, they appeared obliged
to recollect that it was not I who had hurt them. Poor souls! some ended
in great torment. 'I think of them as the happiest; for pain is a cloak
that wraps you about, and I remember one middle-aged man who died softly
at Custozza, and said, 'Beaten!' To take that thought as your travelling
companion into the gulf, must be worse than dying of agony; at least, I
think so."

Vittoria was too well used to Laura's way of meeting disaster to expect
from her other than this ironical fortitude, in which the fortitude
leaned so much upon the irony. What really astonished her was the
conception Laura had taken of the might of Austria. Laura did not
directly speak of it, but shadowed it in allusive hints, much as if
she had in her mind the image of an iron roller going over a field of