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Updated: May 16, 2025
Mechanically her hand moved over the portfolio of the late Countess, and it involuntarily felt in one of its many pockets. Her hand came upon a letter. This had remained when the others had been taken out. It was addressed to the late Earl, and was open. She hesitated a moment, then, with a strange premonition and a tightening of her heart-strings, she spread it out and read it.
Now the blue coats were worn by mature men, some gray, all grave and resolute; husbands and fathers with the memory of wives and children tugging at their heart-strings; homes left desolate behind them, and before them the grim certainty of danger, hardship, and perhaps a captivity worse than death.
She tried her best to grunt with displeasure when Gay, seated in a wash-tub, crowed and beat the water with her dimpled hands, so that it splashed all over the carpet; but all the time there was such a joy tugging at her heart-strings as they had not felt for years.
In that tense half-minute when she stared at the objects he held it seemed to him that her heart-strings must snap under the strain. Then she drew back from them, her eyes filled with horror, her hands raised as if to shut out the sight of them, and a panting, sobbing cry broke from between her pallid lips. "Oh, my God!" she breathed. "Take them away take them away!"
For six years she had held, and hushed, and caressed her dying father's last charge, and now strange, ruthless fingers had torn the clinging heart-strings from the idol. There were no sobs, nor groans, to voice the anguish of the desolate orphan. The glittering eyes were tearless, but the brow was darkly furrowed, the ashy lips writhed, and the folded hands were purple from compression.
She had made the place look cheery and neat and homelike. She felt that queer tugging at her heart-strings again. Suppose she belonged here, and was waiting for Peter to come home to tea. Suppose Nancy whirled around with a sudden horrible prescience of what she was going to see! Peter Wright was standing in the doorway. Nancy's face went crimson.
And whensoever you shall call upon us, we will be ready to come and do you service. Then the Cid made answer, weening that this was spoken without deceit, My sons, I am troubled at what ye say, for when ye take away my daughters ye take my very heart-strings: nevertheless, it is fitting that ye do as ye have said.
A veritable chorus of enthusiasm greeted the end of his long peroration. The Machiavelian scheme, almost devilish in its cunning, in its subtle knowledge of human nature and of the heart-strings of a noble organisation like Deroulede's, commended itself to these patriots, who were thirsting for the downfall of a superior enemy.
Drawn together after dark days and severe trials, solemnly pledged to each other by the people whom the Union raised to a full citizenship in the Republic, bound by a compact designed to be without limitation of time, lifted by their consolidation to a place and fame and prosperity which they would never else have reached, mutually necessary to each other's thrift and protection, making a nation adapted by its organic constitution to the region of the earth which it occupies, and now, by previous memories and traditions, by millions of social and domestic alliances, knit by heart-strings the sundering of which will be followed by a flow of the life-blood till all is spent, these terms are but a feeble setting forth of the relations of these States to each other and to the Union.
For the second time that day Aziel's glance met hers, and for the second time a strange new pang that was more pain than joy, and yet half-divine, snatched at his heart-strings, for a while numbing his reason and taking from him the power of speech. "What was it?" he wondered vaguely.
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