“You speak in riddles, Captain von Vincke,” she said.
She had now taken back her hand; but she was sitting quietly by his bedside, and made no sign of leaving him.
“Nina,” he said, “Nina,—my own Nina. In losing a single share of Venice,—one soldier’s share of the province,—shall I have gained all the world for myself? Nina, tell me truly, what brought you to Verona?”
She knelt slowly down by his bedside, and again taking his one hand in hers, pressed it first to her lips and then to her bosom. “It was an unmaidenly purpose,” she said. “I came to find the man I loved.”
“But you said you had failed?”
“And I now say that I have succeeded. Do you not know that success in great matters always trembles in the balance before it turns the beam, thinking, fearing, all but knowing that failure has weighed down the scale?”
“But now——?”
“Now I am sure that—Venice has been won.”
It was three months after this, and half of December had passed away, and all Venetia had in truth been ceded, and Victor Emmanuel had made his entry in to Venice and exit out of it, with as little of real triumph as ever attended a king’s progress through a new province, and the Austrian army had moved itself off very quietly, and the city had become as thoroughly Italian as Florence itself, and was in a way to be equally discontented, when a party of four, two ladies and two gentlemen, sat down to breakfast in the Hôtel Bauer.
The ladies were the Signora Pepé and her daughter, and the men were Carlo Pepé and his brother-in-law, Hubert von Vincke. It was but a poor fête, this family breakfast at an obscure inn, but it was intended as a gala feast to mark the last day of Nina’s Italian life.