Thou mayest count on my
testimony in this strait--if thou art guilty of this crime, who can hope
to be innocent?"
Maso returned the friendly grasp till their fingers seemed to grow into
each other. His eye, too, showed he was not without wholesome native
sympathies, though education and his habits might have warped them from
their true direction. A tear, in spite of his effort to suppress the
weakness started from its fountain, rolling down his sunburnt cheek like a
solitary rivulet trickling through a barren and rugged waste.
"This is frank, and as becomes a soldier, Signore," he said, "and I
receive it as it is given, in kindness and love. But we will not lay more
stress upon the affair of the lake than it deserves. This keen-sighted
chatelain need not be told that I could not be of use in saving your
lives, without saving my own; and, unless I much mistake the meaning of
his eye, he is about to say that we are fashioned like this wild country
in which chance has brought us together, with our spots of generous
fertility mingled with much unfruitful rock, and that he who does a good
act to-day may forget himself by doing an evil turn to-morrow.
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