and the track is lost. This is your wish? It is pitching new camps to
avoid the enemy. But so! a man takes this disease and his common work at
once of a woman--she is all the disease, till it is extinct, or she!
What is this disease but a silly, a senseless waste? Giulia--woman that
she is!--will not call it so. See her eyes doze and her voice go a soft
buzz when she speaks it! As a dove of the woods! That it almost makes
it sweet to me! Yes, a daughter of Italy! So Giulia has been:--will be?
I know not! So will this your Emilia be in the time that comes to the
young people, she has this, as you say, malady very strong--ma, ogni male
ha la sua ricetta; I can say it of persons. Of nations to think my heart
is as an infidel--very heavy. Ah! till I turn to you--who revive to the
thought, as you were an army of deliverance. For you are Hope. You know
not Despair. You are Hope. And you love as myself a mother whose son
you are not! 'Oh!' is Giulia's cry, 'will our Italy reward him with a
daughter?'--the noblest that we have. Yes, for she would be Italian
always through you. We pray that you may not get old too soon, before
she grows for you and is found, only that you may know in her our love.
See! I am brought to talk this language. The woman is in me."

Merthyr said, as he read this, "I could wish no better." His feeling for
Emilia waxed toward a self-avowal as she advanced to womanhood; and the
last stage of it had struck among trembling strings in the inmost
chambers of his heart. That last stage of it--her passionate claiming of
Wilfrid before two women, one her rival--slept like a covered furnace
within him. "Can you remember none of her words?" he said more than once
to Georgiana, who replied: "I would try to give you an idea of what she
said, but I might as well try to paint lightning."

"'My lover'?" suggested Merthyr.