“I can avenge him.”
Ginevra quivered. Though the stranger was handsome, his appearance had not influenced her; the soft pity in a woman’s heart for miseries that are not ignoble had stifled in Ginevra all other emotions; but to hear a cry of vengeance, to find in that proscribed being an Italian soul, devotion to Napoleon, Corsican generosity!—ah! that was, indeed, too much for her. She looked at the officer with a respectful emotion which shook his heart. For the first time in her life a man had caused her a keen emotion. She now, like other women, put the soul of the stranger on a par with the noble beauty of his features and the happy proportions of his figure, which she admired as an artist. Led by accidental curiosity to pity, from pity to a powerful interest, she came, through that interest, to such profound sensations that she felt she was in danger if she stayed there longer.
“Until to-morrow, then,” she said, giving the officer a gentle smile by way of a parting consolation.
Seeing that smile, which threw a new light on Ginevra’s features, the stranger forgot all else for an instant.
“To-morrow,” he said, sadly; “but to-morrow, Labedoyere—”
Ginevra turned, put a finger on her lips, and looked at him, as if to say: “Be calm, be prudent.”
And the young man cried out in his own language:
“Ah! Dio! che non vorrei vivere dopo averla veduta?—who would not wish to live after seeing her?”
The peculiar accent with which he pronounced the words made Ginevra quiver.
“Are you Corsican?” she cried, returning toward him with a beating heart.