Let us stay on. We shall never have to repent
having done right."
Miss Lydia tossed sleeplessly to and fro in her bed. Sometimes she took
the vague night sounds for preparations for an attack on the house.
Sometimes, less alarmed on her own account, she thought of poor wounded
Orso, who was probably lying on the cold earth, with no help beyond what
she might expect from a bandit's charity. She fancied him covered with
blood, and writhing in hideous suffering; and the extraordinary thing
was that whenever Orso's image rose up before her mind's eye, she always
beheld him as she had seen him when he rode away, pressing the talisman
she had bestowed upon him to his lips. Then she mused over his courage.
She told herself he had exposed himself to the frightful danger he had
just escaped on her account, just for the sake of seeing her a little
sooner. A very little more, and she would have persuaded herself that
Orso had earned his broken arm in her defence! She reproached herself
with being the cause of his wound. But she admired him for it all the
more, and if that celebrated right and left was not so splendid a feat
in her sight as in Brandolaccio's or Colomba's, still she was convinced
few heroes of romance could ever had behaved with such intrepidity and
coolness, in so dangerous a pinch.
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