"We perceived," Count Gamba comments, "from these lines ... that his ambition and his hope were irrevocably fixed upon the glorious objects of his expedition to Greece, and that he had made up his mind to 'return victorious or return no more.'" Readers who are better acquainted than Count Pietro alike with the English language and with the circumstances of the case will find rather more than that in them. They also reveal the memory which Byron fell back upon and lived with at the hours when he rested from the strain of his revolutionary enthusiasm. It was not the memory of Count Pietro's sister. Byron could not possibly have been thinking of her when he cried out that his love was a lonely fire at which no torch was kindled; for her love for him was far fiercer and more enduring than his love for her. His thoughts, it is quite clear, had once more strayed back to Mary Chaworth; and the internal evidence of that is confirmed by the mention of her name in two separate passages of those "Detached Thoughts" which he threw on paper just before he left Ravenna. His attachment to her, he then remembers, threw him out "on a wide, wide sea." He speaks of her as "My M.A.C.," and continues in a passage often quoted: "Alas! why do I say _My_? Our Union would have healed feuds, in which blood had been shed by our fathers; it would have joined lands broad and rich; it would have joined at least _one_ heart, and two persons not ill-matched in years (she is two years my elder); and--and--and--what has been the result? She has married a man older than herself, been wretched, and separated. I have married, and am separated; and yet _we_ are _not_ united." This last fact, indeed, may well have impressed him as the cruellest of all. There had been two desperately unhappy marriages, and a shivering and scattering of two sets of household gods; and yet he and she, through whatever misunderstandings and scruples, had failed to set up their new structure on the ruins. He, indeed, on his part, would have asked nothing better than to be allowed to try that task of reconstruction; but she, on hers, had been too good, or too weak, or too much under the influence of well-meaning friends who believed the whole duty of woman to consist in forgiving her husband and keeping up appearances. She had kept them up, accepting martyrdom with a resignation worthy of a better cause than any which her hard-drinking husband was capable of representing, believing that she only sacrificed herself, and earning no gratitude worth speaking of by doing so. But she had also sacrificed her lover.