“Are you not pleased,” I said, “that I give up everything for you and to you; that I devote my best to the cause--our cause, Nicola; that at the bidding of my brother I have moved my tent into the wilderness? Are you not pleased with me?” “There is danger in the wilderness,” he muttered. “No, I am not pleased.” I fell back with a little shiver. “No more for her than for me,” I answered. “It is not the same,” he said; “it is not the same thing at all.” In an instant he had gripped my wrist. “Send her back into safety. She shall not risk her life here--by God, she shall not!” And then I think I understood. I was calm as death, and as cold. It had needed but these few words to turn me into stone. My God! all my fervour and self-sacrifice--and this for their reward! I laughed out quite gaily-- “O, _mon chéri_! in the rain and the dark? Are you mad? Please to convey us to some shelter.” He hesitated a moment; then beckoned to Patty, who came running like a dog to the whistle. Pissani turned his back as she approached. “Tell your servant to await your orders here,” he muttered; “and, for you, follow me.” Patty stole by my side, dumb over her reception. The fool! the little adorable traitress! How would she have chattered, teeth and heart, had she seen my nails, hid under my cloak, dug into the soft palms they were clinched on. Yet I had an admiration for her, even while I crouched to spring. That she, self-obliterating, undemonstrative with men, could all the time have been softly insinuating herself between me and my love! I had not credited her with so much cleverness. Our sombre patriot led us to a little _osteria_ in a sewer hard by, where the rain beat on a lurid scrap of window, and a mutter of voices from within seemed to mingle in a throaty discussion with a gurgling water-pipe at our feet. There were two or three wine-drinkers revealed as he pushed open the door--strangely respectable folk in these incongruous surroundings. They but glanced up as we entered and passed on by a stone passage to a little remote room, where were a bare table and a single taper glimmering sickly on the wall. Pissani shut the door and faced us. He was very pale and grim; grown sterner than my memory of him, but still the melancholy, romantic brigand of my heart. For a moment he seemed unable to speak; and in that moment I could see my little sister’s hand shake on the table on which she had leaned it for support. The truth was confessed amongst us all in that silence. And I--I knew it suddenly, instantly, for what I had long suspected but struggled to conceal from myself; knew it for the real solution of this my conscious unconscious caprice in bringing Patty with me. It had been to force it, to satisfy myself of the best or the worst, that I had acted as I had done. That I recognised now. And, after all, I was the first to speak. “Well, M. Pissani,” I said, “it seems that one of us at least is _de trop_.” His mouth twitched with nervousness.