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She raised her head proudly, and her eyes shone with dazzling brilliancy.

“The head which falls to-morrow before a dozen muskets will save yours,” she went on. “Wait till the storm is over; you can then escape and take service in foreign countries if you are not forgotten here; or in the French army, if you are.”

In the comfort that women give there is always a delicacy which has something maternal, foreseeing, and complete about it. But when the words of hope and peace are said with grace of gesture and that eloquence of tone which comes from the heart, and when, above all, the benefactress is beautiful, a young man does not resist. The prisoner breathed in love through all his senses. A rosy tinge colored his white cheeks; his eyes lost something of the sadness that dulled them, and he said, in a peculiar tone of voice:–

“You are an angle of goodness– But Labedoyere!” he added. “Oh, Labedoyere!”

At this cry they all three looked at one another in silence, each comprehending the others’ thoughts. No longer friends of twenty minutes only, they were friends of twenty years.

“Dear friend,” said Servin, “can you save him?”

“I can avenge him.”

Ginevra quivered. Though the stranger was handsome, his appearance had not influenced her; the soft pity in a woman’s heart for miseries that are not ignoble had stifled in Ginevra all other emotions; but to hear a cry of vengeance, to find in that proscribed being an Italian soul, devotion to Napoleon, Corsican generosity!–ah! that was, indeed, too much for her. She looked at the officer with a respectful emotion which shook his heart. For the first time in her life a man had caused her a keen emotion. She now, like other women, put the soul of the stranger on a par with the noble beauty of his features and the happy proportions of his figure, which she admired as an artist. Led by accidental curiosity to pity, from pity to a powerful interest, she came, through that interest, to such profound sensations that she felt she was in danger if she stayed there longer.

“Until to-morrow, then,” she said, giving the officer a gentle smile by way of a parting consolation.

Seeing that smile, which threw a new light on Ginevra’s features, the stranger forgot all else for an instant.

“To-morrow,” he said, sadly; “but to-morrow, Labedoyere–“

Ginevra turned, put a finger on her lips, and looked at him, as if to say: “Be calm, be prudent.”

And the young man cried out in his own language:

“Ah! Dio! che non vorrei vivere dopo averla veduta?–who would not wish to live after seeing her?”

The peculiar accent with which he pronounced the words made Ginevra quiver.

“Are you Corsican?” she cried, returning toward him with a beating heart.

“I was born in Corsica,” he replied; “but I was brought, while very young, to Genoa, and as soon as I was old enough for military service I enlisted.”

The beauty of the young man, the mighty charm lent to him by his attachment to the Emperor, his wound, his misfortunes, his danger, all disappeared to Ginevra’s mind, or, rather, all were blended in one sentiment,–a new and delightful sentiment. This persecuted man was a child of Corsica; he spoke its cherished language! She stood, for a moment, motionless; held by a magical sensation; before her eyes was a living picture, to which all human sentiments, united by chance, gave vivid colors. By Servin’s invitation, the officer had seated himself on a divan, and the painter, after removing the sling which supported the arm of his guest, was undoing the bandages in order to dress the wound. Ginevra shuddered when she saw the long, broad gash made by the blade of a sabre on the young man’s forearm, and a moan escaped her. The stranger raised his head and smiled to her. There was something touching which went to the soul, in the care with which Servin lifted the lint and touched the lacerated flesh, while the face of the wounded man, though pale and sickly, expressed, as he looked at the girl, more pleasure than suffering. An artist would have admired, involuntarily, this opposition of sentiments, together with the contrasts produced by the whiteness of the linen and the bared arm to the red and blue uniform of the officer.