“Carlo is still with the general; but he is well.”
“And the Signora?”
“She also is well; well, but not easy in mind while I am here.”
“And when do you return?”
“Nay; I cannot tell you that. It may be to-day. It may be to-morrow. It depends not on myself at all.”
He spoke not a word of love to her then, nor she to him, unless there was love in such greeting as has been here repeated. Indeed, it was not till after that first interview that he fully understood that she had made her journey to Verona, solely in quest of him. The words between them for the first day or two were very tame, as though neither had full confidence in the other; and she had taken her place as nurse by his side, as a sister might have done by a brother, and was established in her work,—nay, had nearly completed her work, before there came to be any full understanding between them. More than once she had told herself that she would go back to Venice and let there be an end of it. “The great work of the war,” she said to herself, “has so filled his mind, that the idleness of his days in Venice and all that he did then, are forgotten. If so, my presence here is surely a sore burden to him, and I will go.” But she could not now leave him without a word of farewell. “Hubert,” she said, for she had called him Hubert when she first came to his bedside, as though she had been his sister, “I think I must return now to Venice. My mother will be lonely without me.”
At that moment it appeared almost miraculous to her that she should be sitting there by his bedside, that she should have loved him, that she should have had the courage to leave her home and seek him after the war, that she should have found him, and that she should now be about to leave him, almost without a word between them.
“She must be very lonely,” said the wounded man.
“And you, I think, are stronger than you were?”
“For me, I am strong enough. I have lost my arm, and I shall carry this gaping scar athwart my face to the grave, as my cross of honour won in the Italian war; but otherwise I shall soon be well.”