light as of reviving life, or of pain comforted, when
it was she who was sitting by Merthyr's side, and when at times she saw
the hopeless effort of his hand to reach to hers, or during the long
still hours she laid her head on his pillow, and knew that he breathed
gratefully. The sweetness of helping him, and of making his breathing
pleasant to him, closed much of the world which lay beyond her windows
to her thoughts, and surprised her with an unknown emotion, so strange
to her that when it first swept up her veins she had the fancy of her
having been touched by a supernatural hand, and heard a flying accord of
instruments. She was praying before she knew what prayer was. A crucifix
hung over Merthyr's head. She had looked on it many times, and looked on
it still, without seeing more than the old sorrow. In the night it was
dim. She found herself trying to read the features of the thorn-crowned
Head in the solitary night. She and it were alone with a life that
was faint above the engulphing darkness. She prayed for the life, and
trembled, and shed tears, and would have checked them; they seemed to
be bearing away her little remaining strength. The tears streamed. No
answer was given to her question, "Why do I weep?" She wept when Merthyr
had passed the danger, as she had wept when the hours went by, with
shrouded visages; and though she felt the difference m the springs of
her tears, she thought them but a simple form of weakness showing shade
and light.

These tears were a vanward wave of the sea to follow; the rising of her
voice to heaven was no more than a twitter of the earliest dawn before
the coming of her soul's outcry.

"I have had a weeping fit," she thought, and resolved to remember it
tenderly, as being associated with her friend's recovery, and a singular
masterful power absolutely to look on the Austrians marching up the
streets of Milan, and not to feel the surging hatred, or the nerveless
despair, which she had supposed must be her alternatives.

It is a mean image to say that the entry of the Austrians into the
reconquered city was like a river of oil permeating a lake of vinegar,
but it presents the fact in every sense. They demanded nothing more than
submission, and placed a gentle foot upon the fallen enemy; and wherever
they appeared they were isolated. The deepest wrath of the city was,
nevertheless, not directed against them, but against Carlo Alberto,
who had pledged his honour to defend it,