"You are wild with your joyous emotion," she said, coming forward and
clinging round me. "Your eyes flame from depths of darkness. What, after
all, is Italy to you, that your blood should boil in thinking of her
wrongs? These people, for whom in your terrible magnanimity, I feel that
you would sacrifice even me, to-morrow would turn and rend you!"

"No, no!" I answered. "All things but you! You, you, are before my
country!"

The tears filled her large, serious eyes, her lips quivered in
melancholy smile, as sunshine plays with shower over autumn woodlands.
Was I not right? Right, though the universe declare me wrong! I would do
it all again; if she loved me, she had authority to be first of all in
my care; in love lie the highest duties of existence.

I had forgotten the subject on which we spoke; I was thinking only of
her, her beauty, her tenderness, and the debt of deathless devotion that
I owed her. It was otherwise in her thought; she had not dropped the old
thread, but, looking up, resumed.

"It is, then, an idea that you serve?"

Brought back from my reverie, "Could I serve a more worthy master?" I
asked.

"You do not particularly love your countrymen, nine-tenths of whom
you have never seen? You do not particularly hate the hostile race,
nine-tenths of whom you have never seen?"

"Abstractly, I hate them. Kindliness of heart prevents individual