"They say the Italians didn't know how to fight," he said one day, musingly--"that the French had to come down and do their work for them. People forget how long it was since they had had any fighting to do. But they hadn't forgotten how to suffer and hold their tongues; how to die and take their secrets with them. The Italian war of independence was really carried on underground: it was one of those awful silent struggles which are so much more terrible than the roar of a battle. It's a deuced sight easier to charge with your regiment than to lie rotting in an Austrian prison and know that if you give up the name of a friend or two you can go back scot-free to your wife and children. And thousands and thousands of Italians had the choice given them--and hardly one went back." He sat silent, his meditative fingertips laid together, his eyes fixed on the past which was the now only thing clearly visible to them. "And the women?" I said. "Were they as brave as the men?" I had not spoken quite at random. I had always heard that there had been as much of love as of war in Colonel Alingdon's early career, and I hoped that my question might give a personal turn to his reminiscences. "The women?" he repeated. "They were braver--for they had more to bear and less to do. Italy could never have been saved without them." His eye had kindled and I detected in it the reflection of some vivid memory. It was then that I asked him what was the bravest thing he had ever known of a woman's doing. The question was such a vague one that I hardly knew why I had put it, but to my surprise he answered almost at once, as though I had touched on a subject of frequent meditation. "The bravest thing I ever saw done by a woman," he said, "was brought about by an act of my own--and one of which I am not particularly proud. For that reason I have never spoken of it before--there was a time when I didn't even care to think of it--but all that is past now. She died years ago, and so did the Jack Alingdon she knew, and in telling you the story I am no more than the mouthpiece of an old tradition which some ancestor might have handed down to me." He leaned back, his clear blind gaze fixed smilingly on me, and I had the feeling that, in groping through the labyrinth of his young adventures, I had come unawares upon their central point. II When I was in Milan in 'forty-seven an unlucky thing happened to me.