Miss Nevil did not answer for some time, and her father's suggestion evidently caused her considerable perplexity. At last she said:
"How can we leave this poor young creature, just when she is so much in need of consolation? Don't you think that would be cruel, father?"
"I only spoke on your account, child," said the colonel. "And I assure you that if I once felt you were safe in the hotel at Ajaccio, I should be very sorry to leave this cursed island myself, without shaking that plucky fellow della Rebbia's hand again."
"Well then, father, let us wait a while, and before we start let us make quite sure we can not be of any use to them."
"Kind soul!" said the colonel, as he kissed his daughter's forehead.
"It is a pleasure to see you sacrifice yourself for the sake of softening other people's suffering. Let us stay on. We shall never have to repent having done right."
Miss Lydia tossed sleeplessly to and fro in her bed. Sometimes she took the vague night sounds for preparations for an attack on the house. Sometimes, less alarmed on her own account, she thought of poor wounded Orso, who was probably lying on the cold earth, with no help beyond what she might expect from a bandit's charity. She fancied him covered with blood, and writhing in hideous suffering; and the extraordinary thing was that whenever Orso's image rose up before her mind's eye, she always beheld him as she had seen him when he rode away, pressing the talisman she had bestowed upon him to his lips.
Then she mused over his courage. She told herself he had exposed himself to the frightful danger he had just escaped on her account, just for the sake of seeing her a little sooner. A very little more, and she would have persuaded herself that Orso had earned his broken arm in her defence! She reproached herself with being the cause of his wound. But she admired him for it all the more, and if that celebrated right and left was not so splendid a feat in her sight as in Brandolaccio's or Colomba's, still she was convinced few heroes of romance could ever had behaved with such intrepidity and coolness, in so dangerous a pinch.
Her room was that usually occupied by Colomba. Above a kind of oaken /prie-dieu/, and beside a sprig of blessed palm, a little miniature of Orso, in his sub-lieutenant's uniform, hung on the wall. Miss Nevil took the portrait down, looked at it for a long time, and laid it at last on the table by her bed, instead of hanging it up again in its place. She did not fall asleep till daybreak, and when she woke the sun had travelled high above the horizon. In front of her bed she beheld Colomba, waiting, motionless, till she should open her eyes.
"Well, dear lady, are you not very uncomfortable in this poor house of ours?" said Colomba to her. "I fear you have hardly slept at all."
"Have you any news, dear friend?" cried Miss Nevil, sitting up in bed.
Her eye fell on Orso's picture, and she hastily tossed her handkerchief upon it.
"Yes, I have news," said Colomba, with a smile.
Then she took up the picture.
"Do you think it like him? He is better looking than that!"
"Really," stammered Miss Nevil, quite confused, "I took down that picture in a fit of absence! I have a horrid habit of touching everything and never putting anything back! How is your brother?"
"Fairly well. Giocanto came here before four o'clock this morning. He brought me a letter for you, Miss Lydia. Orso hasn't written anything to me! It is addressed to Colomba, indeed, but underneath that he has written 'For Miss N.' But sisters are never jealous! Giocanto says it hurt him dreadfully to write. Giocanto, who writes a splendid hand, offered to do it at his dictation. But he would not let him. He wrote it with a pencil, lying on his back. Brandolaccio held the paper for him. My brother kept trying to raise himself, and then the very slightest movement gave him the most dreadful agony in his arm.
Giocanto says it was pitiful. Here is his letter."
Miss Nevil read the letter, which, as an extra precaution, no doubt, was written in English. Its contents were as follows:
"MADEMOISELLE: An unhappy fate has driven me on. I know not what my enemies will say, what slanders they will invent. I care little, so long as you, mademoiselle, give them no credence! Ever since I first saw you I have been nursing wild dreams. I needed this catastrophe to show me my own folly.
