It embraces many a
lovely and romantic spot, only the choice of our last resting place is
not left to ourselves."
Lady Mabel shuddered at this gloomy picture, and his foreboding
tone. She knew how many of her countrymen had fallen, and must fall,
in this bloody war. Yet, somehow or other, she had always thought of
L'Isle as one who was to live, and not to die prematurely, cut off in
youth, health, the pride of manhood, his hopes, powers, aspirations,
just in their bloom. She looked at him with deep, painful interest, as
if to read his fortune in his face. What special safeguard protected
him? The next moment her conscience pricked her, when her father's
image rose before her, grown gray in service, and seamed with scars,
yet no safer by all his dangers past than the last recruit, and she
walked slowly forth from the Franciscan church with sadder and more
solemn impressions of the reality and imminence of death than could be
generated by all that vast array of grinning skulls.
It was growing late, and they turned toward the _estalagem_. As they
strolled on, L'Isle, in the same strain of thought which had last
occupied them, said: "War is essentially a greedy thing, a great and
speedy consumer of what has been slowly produced in peace.
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