"She was perfectly right," says Amelia, still speaking quite quietly; "it is astonishing that I should not have seen it; and it was child-stealing; you were barely twenty-one, and I—I was not very young for a woman even then—I was twenty-three. I ought to have known better."

For once in his life Burgoyne is absolutely bereft of speech. It is always a difficult matter to rebut a charge of being dead sick of a woman without conveying an insult in the very denial; and when there lies a horrid substratum of truth under the exaggeration of the accusation, the difficulty becomes an impossibility.

"However, it might have been much worse," continues Miss Wilson; "just think if I had overheard it only after I had married you, when I knew that there was nothing but death that could rid you of me. I thank God I have heard it in time."

His throat is still too dry for him to speak; but he stretches out his arm to encircle her in a mute protest at that thanksgiving over her own shipwreck; but, for the first time in her life, she eludes his caress.

"Child-stealing," she repeats, under her breath; "and yet"—with a touching impulse of apology and deprecation—"you seemed old for your age; you seemed so much in earnest; I think you really were;"—a wistful pause—"and afterwards, though of course I could not help seeing that I was not to you what you were to me, yet I thought—I hoped that if I waited—if I was patient—if no one else—no one more worthy of you came between us"—another and still wistfuller delay in her halting speech—"you might grow a little fond of me, out of long habit; I never expected you to be more than a little fond of me!"

He has entirely hidden his face in his two hands, so that she is without that index to guide her as to the effect produced by her words, and he continues completely silent. Whether, even after her rude awakening, she still, deep in her heart, cherishes some pale hope of a denial, an explaining away of the reported utterances, who shall say? It is with a half-choked sigh that she goes on:

"But you could not; I am not so unjust as not to know that you tried your best. Poor fellow! it must have been uphill work for you"—with a first touch of bitterness—"labouring to love me, for eight years; is it any wonder that you failed? and I was so thick-skinned I did not see it—the 'hide of a hippopotamus' indeed! There could not be a juster comparison; and now all I can do is to beg your pardon for having spoilt eight of your best years—your best years"—with slow iteration; "but come"—more lightly—"you have some very good ones left too; you are still quite young; for a man you are quite young; the harm I have done you is not irreparable; I think"—with an accent of reproach—"you might ease my mind by telling me that the harm I have done you is not irreparable!"

Thus appealed to, it is impossible for him any longer to maintain his attitude of disguise and concealment. His hands must needs be withdrawn from before his face; and, as he turns that face towards her, she perceives with astonishment, almost consternation, that there is an undoubted tear in each of his hard gray eyes.

"And what about the harm I have done to you?" he asks under his breath, as if having no confidence in his voice; "what about the eight best years of your life?"

A look of affection, so high and tender and selfless, as to seem to remove her love out of the category of the mortal and the transitory, dawns and grows in her wan face.

"Do not fret about them," she answers soothingly, "they were—they always will have been—the eight best years of my life. They were full of good and pleasant things. Do not forget—I would not for worlds have you forget—I shall never forget myself—that they all came to me through you!"

At her words, most innocent as they are of any intention of producing such an effect, a hot flush of shame rises to his very forehead, as his memory presents to him the successive eras into which these eight good years had divided themselves: six months of headlong boyish passion; six months of cooling fever; and seven years of careless, intermittent, matter-of-course, half-tenderness.

"Through me?" he repeats, with an accent of the deepest self-abasement; "you do not mean to be ironical, dear; you were never such a thing in your life; you could not be if you tried; but if you knew what a sweep you make me feel when you say the sort of thing you have just said!—and so it is all to come to an end, is it? Good as these eight years have been, you have had enough of them? You do not want any more like them?"

She says neither yes nor no. He remains unanswered, unless the faint smile in her weary eyes and about her drooped mouth can count for a reply.

"And all because you have heard some fool say that I was tired of you?"

The tight smile spreads a little wider, and invades her pale cheeks.

"Worse than tired! sick! sick to death!"

She is looking straight before her, at the landscape simmering in the climbing sun, the divine landscape new and young as it was before duomo and bell-tower sprang and towered heavenwards. Why should her gaze dwell any more upon him? She has renounced him, her eyes must fain renounce him too. As he hears her words, as he watches her patient profile, the sole suffering thing in the universal morning joy, a great revulsion of feeling, a great compassion mixed with as large a remorse pours in torrent over his heart. These emotions are so strong that they make him deceive even himself as to their nature. It seems to him as if scales had suddenly fallen from his eyes, showing him how profoundly he prizes the now departing good, telling him that life can neither ask nor give anything better than the undemanding, selfless, boundless love about to withdraw its shelter from him. His arm steals round her waist, and not once does it flash across his mind—as, to his shame be it spoken, it has often flashed before—what a long way it has to steal!

"Am I sick of you, Amelia?"

She makes no effort to release herself. It does him no harm that she should once more rest within his clasp. But she still looks straight before her at lucent Firenze and her olives, and says three times, accompanying each repetition of the word with a sorrowful little head-shake:

"Yes! yes! YES!"

He will compel her to look at him, his own Amelia. Have not all her tender looks been his for eight long years? He puts out his disengaged hand, and with it determinately turns her poor quivering face round so as to meet his gaze.

"Am I sick of you, Amelia?"

In the emotion of the moment, it appears to him as if there were something almost ludicrously improbable and lying about that accusation, in which, when first brought against him, his guilty soul had admitted more than a grain of truth. Her faded eyes turn to his, like flowers to their sun; the veracity of his voice and of his eager gray orbs—still softened from their habitual severity by the tears that had so lately wet them—making such a hope, as, five minutes ago, she had thought never again to cherish, leap into splendid life in her sick heart.

"Is it possible?" she murmurs, almost inaudibly, "do you mean—that you are not?"

They go down the hill, past the cottages, and the incurious peasants, hand in hand, her soul running over with a deep joy; and his occupied by an unfamiliar calm, that is yet backed by an ache of remorse, and by—what else? That "else" he himself neither could nor would define. He spends the whole of that day with Amelia, both lunching and dining with her and her family; a course which calls forth expressions of unaffected surprise, not at all tinctured with malice—unless it be in the case of Sybilla, who has never been partial to him—from each of them.

"We have been thinking that Jim was going to jilt you, Amelia!" Cecilia has said with graceful badinage; nor, strange to say, has she been at all offended when Jim has retorted, with equal grace and much superior ill-nature, that on such a subject no one could speak with more authority than she.

The large white stars are making the nightly sky almost as gorgeous as the day's departed majesty had done, ere Jim finds himself back at his hotel. His intention of quietly retreating to his own room is traversed by Byng, who, having evidently been on the watch for him, springs up the stairs, three steps at a time, after him.

"Where have you been all day?" he inquires impatiently.

"At the Anglo-AmÉricain. I wonder you are not tired of always asking the same question and receiving the same answer to it."

"I am not so sure that I should always receive the same answer," replies the other, with a forced laugh—"but stop a bit!"—seeing a decided quickening of speed in his friend's upward movements—"my mother is asking for you; she has been asking for you all the afternoon; she wants to speak to you before she goes."

"Goes?"

"Yes, she is off at seven o'clock to-morrow morning—back to England: she had a telegram to-day to say that her old aunt, the one who brought her up, has had a second stroke. No!"—seeing Jim begin to arrange his features in that decorous shape of grave sympathy which we naturally assume on such occasions—"it is no case of great grief; the poor old woman has been quite silly ever since her last attack; but mother thinks that she ought to be there, at—at the end; to look after things, and so forth."

There is an alertness, a something that expresses the reverse of regret in the tone employed by Mrs. Byng's son in this detailed account of the causes of her imminent departure, which, even if his thoughts had not already sprung in that direction, would have set Burgoyne thinking as to the mode in which the young man before him is likely to employ the liberty that his parent's absence will restore to him.

"I offered to go with her," says Byng, perhaps discerning a portion at least of his companion's disapprobation.

"And she refused?"

Byng looks down, and begins to kick the banisters—they are still on the stairs—idly with one foot.

"Mother is so unselfish that it is always difficult to make out what she really wishes; but—but I do not quite see of what use I should be to her if I did go."

There is a moment's pause; then Burgoyne speaks, in a dry, hortatory elder brother's voice:

"If you take my advice you will go home."

The disinterested counsel of wise elder brothers is not always taken in the spirit it merits; and there is no trace of docile and unquestioning acquiescence in Byng's monosyllabic—

"Why?"

"Because, if you stay here, I think you will most likely get into mischief."

The young man's usually good-humoured eyes give out a blue spark that looks rather like fight.

"The same kind of mischief that you have been getting into during the past week?" he inquires slowly.

The acquaintance with his movements evidenced by this last sentence, no less than the light they throw upon his own motives, stagger Jim, to the extent of making him accept the sneer in total silence. Is not it a richly deserved one? But the sweet-natured Byng is already repenting it; and there is something conciliatory and almost entreating in the spirit of his last remark:

"I do not know what has happened to my mother," he says, lowering his voice; "there is no one less of a mauvaise langue than she, as you know; but in the case of——"—he breaks off and begins his sentence afresh; "she has been warning me against them again; I can't find that she has any reason to go upon; but she has taken a violent prejudice against her. She says that it is one of her instincts; and you—you have done nothing towards setting her right?"

Perhaps it may be that his young friend's reported metaphor of the "hippopotamus hide" has not served to render him any dearer to Jim; but there is certainly no great suavity in his reply:

"Why should I?—it is no concern of mine."

"No concern of yours to stand by and see an angel's white robe besmirched by the foul mire of slander?" cries Byng indignantly, and lapsing into that high-flown mood which never fails to make his more work-a-day companion "see blood."

"When I come across such a disagreeable sight it will be time enough to decide whether I will interfere or not. At present I have not met with anything of the kind," returns he, resolutely putting an end to the dialogue by knocking at Mrs. Byng's portal, within which he is at once admitted.

The door of the bedroom communicating with the salon is open, and through it he sees the lady he has come to visit standing surrounded by gaping dress-baskets, strewn raiment, and scattered papers; all the uncomfortable litter that speaks of an imminent departure. She joins him at once, and, shutting the door behind her, sits down with a fagged air.

"I hear," he begins—"Willy tells me—I am very sorry to hear——"

"Oh, there is no great cause for sorrow," rejoins she quickly, as if anxious to disclaim a grief which might be supposed to check or limit her conversation—"poor dear old auntie!—the people who love her best could not wish to keep her in the state she has been in for the last year; oh, dear!"—sighing—"how very dismal the dregs of life are! do not you hope, Jim, that we shall die before we come to be 'happy releases'?"

"I do indeed," replies he gravely; "I expect to be sick—dead-sick of life long before I reach that stage of it."

He looks at her resentfully as she speaks, but she has so entirely forgotten her own application of the accented adjectives to his feelings for Amelia, that she replies only by a rather puzzled but perfectly innocent glance.

"I never was so unwilling to leave any place in my life," she goes on presently, pursuing her own train of thought; "I do not know how to describe it—a sort of presentiment."

He smiles.

"And yet I do not think that there are any owls in the Piazza to hoot under your windows!"

"Perhaps not," rejoins she, with some warmth; "but what is still more unlucky than that happened to me last night; they passed the wine the wrong way round the table at the MacIvors. I was on thorns!"

"And you think that the wine going the wrong way round the table gave your aunt a stroke?" inquires Jim, with an irritating air of asking for information.

Mrs. Byng reddens slightly.

"I think nothing of the kind; I draw no inference; I only state a fact; it is a very unlucky thing to send the wine round the wrong way: if you had not spent your life among grizzly bears and cannibals you would have known it too!"

"There are no cannibals in the Rocky Mountains," corrects Jim quietly; and then they both laugh, and recommence their talk on a more friendly footing.

"I am not at all happy about Willy."

"No?"

"It is not his health so much—his colour is good, and his appetite not bad."

"Except the Fat Boy in 'Pickwick,' I never heard of anyone who had a better."

"But he is not himself; there is something odd about him!"

"Indeed!"

"Have not you noticed it yourself?—do not you think that there is something odd about him? Does not he strike you as odd?"

"Odd?" repeats Burgoyne slowly, reflecting in how extremely commonplace a light both the virtues and vices of his fellow-traveller have always presented themselves to him; "it would never have occurred to me that Willy was odd; I cannot"—smiling—"encourage you in the idea that you have added one to the number of the world's eccentrics."

She sighs rather impatiently at his apparently intentional misunderstanding of her drift.

"'Children are avenues to misfortune,' as somebody said, and I think that, whoever he was, he was right. 'If Jacob take a wife of the daughters of Heth, such as are those in the land, what good shall my life do to me?'"

"Why should you credit Jacob with any such intention?"

"I do not half like leaving him here by himself."

"By himself? You count me as no one then?"

"Oh yes, I do—I count you as a great deal; that is why I was so anxious to speak to you before I went; of course I do not expect you to take upon yourself the whole responsibility of him, but you might keep an eye upon him."

He shrugs his shoulders.

"As I have to keep the other eye upon myself, I am afraid that the effort would but make me squint."

"It is his own generosity that I am afraid of—his self-sacrificing impulses; I am always in terror of his marrying someone out of pure good-nature, just to oblige her, just because she looked as if she wished it."

"Stevenson thinks that it does not much matter whom we marry, whether 'noisy scullions,' or 'acidulous vestals.'"

"I do not care what Stevenson thinks: ever since Willy was in Eton jackets, I have had a nightmare of his bringing me home as daughter-in-law some poor little governess with her nose through her veil, and her fingers through her gloves!"

Burgoyne smiles involuntarily as a vision of Elizabeth's daintily-clad hands flashes before his mental eye.

"I think you overrate his magnanimity; I never saw him at all tender to anyone whose gloves were not beyond suspicion."

Mrs. Byng laughs constrainedly.

"Well, if she has not holes in her gloves, she may have holes in her reputation, which is worse."

Jim draws in his breath hard. The tug of war is coming, as the preceding leading remark, lugged in by the head and shoulders, sufficiently evidences. At all events he will do nothing to make its approach easier or quicker. He awaits it in silence.

"These Le Marchants—as they are friends of yours—I suppose that I ought not to say anything against them?"

"I am sure that you are too well-bred to do anything of the kind," replies he precipitately, with a determined effort to stop her mouth with a compliment, which she is equally determined not to deserve.

"I do not think I am; I am only well-bred now and then, when it suits me; I am not going to be well-bred to-night."

"I am sorry to hear it."

"Whether they are friends of yours or not, I do not like them."

"I do not think that that matters much, either to you or to them."

"I have an instinct that they are adventuresses."

"I know for a certainty "—with growing warmth—"that they are nothing of the kind."

"Then why do not they go out anywhere?"

"Because they do not choose."

"Because no one asks them, more likely! Why were they so determined not to be introduced to me?"

"How can I tell? Perhaps"—with a wrathful laugh—"they did not like your looks!"

She echoes his false mirth with no inferior exasperation.

"Who is ill-bred now?"

Her tone calls him back to a sense of the ungentleman-likeness and puerility of his conduct.

"I!"—he replies contritely—"undoubtedly I! but——"

"Do not apologize," interrupts she, recovering her equanimity with that ease which she has transmitted to her son; "I like you for standing up for them if they are your friends; and I hope that you will do the same good office for me when someone sticks pins into me behind my back; but come now, let us be rational; surely we may talk quietly about them without insulting each other, may not we?"

"I do not know; we can try."

"I suppose"—a little ironically—"that you are not so sensitive about them but that you can bear me to ask a few perfectly harmless questions?"

He writhes. "Of course! of course! what are they to me?—they are nothing to me!"

A look of incredulity, which she perhaps does not take any very great pains to conceal, spreads over her face.

"Then you really will be doing me a great service if you tell me just exactly all you know about them, good and bad."

"All I know about them," replies Jim in a rapid parrot-voice, as if he were rattling over some disagreeable lesson—"is that they were extremely kind to me ten years ago; that they had a beautiful place in Devonshire, and were universally loved and respected: I hear that they have let their place; so no doubt they are not so much loved and respected as they were; and now you know as much about the matter as I do!"