The words are scarcely out of Mrs. Byng's mouth before she adds, in a changed key, and with an altered direction of the eyes—

"Is this person looking for you? He seems to be coming straight towards us."

Jim turns his head at her speech, and at once recognises in the figure hastening towards them the porter of the Anglo-AmÉricain hotel. The man looks strangely, and carries a slip of paper, unfolded and open, in his hand.

In a second Jim has sprung to his side, has snatched the paper, and is staring at its contents. They are hardly legible, scrawled tremblingly with a pencil, and for a moment he cannot make them out. Then, as he looks, in one horrible flash their import has sprung into his eyes and brain.

"She is gone; come to us!"

Mrs. Byng is reading too, over his shoulder.

In going over the scene in memory afterwards, he believes that she gives a sort of scream, and says, "Oh, what does it mean? It is not true!" But at the time he hears, he knows nothing.

He is out of the church; he is in the fiacre waiting at the door: he is tearing through the streets, with the hot summer air flowing in a quick current against his face. He thinks afterwards at what a pace the horse must have been going, and how the poor jade must have been lashed to keep it up to that useless speed. At the time he thinks nothing, he feels nothing. He rushes through the court of the hotel, rushes through what seem to be people; he thinks afterwards that they must have been waiters and chambermaids, and that there came a sort of compassionate murmur from them as he passed. He is up the stairs, the three flights; as he tears up, three steps at a time, there comes across his numbed intelligence a flash of wonder why they always give Amelia the worst room. He is at that door, outside which he has spent so many hours of breathless listening; he need no longer stay outside it now. It is open, inviting him in. He is across that, as yet, unpassed threshold, that threshold over which he was to have stepped in careful, soft-footed joy to-morrow. He has pushed through the people—why must there be people everywhere?—of whom the room seems full, unnecessarily full; he is at the bedside. Across the foot a figure seems thrown—he learns afterwards that that is Sybilla. Another figure is prostrate on the floor, heaving, in dreadful dry sobs; that is Cecilia. A third is standing upright and tearless, looking down upon what, an hour ago, was his most patient daughter. They have left her alone now—have ceased to tease her. They no longer hold a looking-glass to her pale mouth, or beat her tired feet, or pour useless cordials between her lips. They have ceased to cry out upon her name, having realized that she is much too far away to hear them. Neither does he cry out. He just goes and stands by the father, and takes his thin old hand in his; and together they gaze on that poor temple, out of which the spirit that was so much too lovely for it has fleeted. Later on they tell him how it came about; later on, when they are all sitting huddled in the little dark salon. Cecilia is the spokeswoman, and Sybilla puts in sobbing corrections now and again.

"She was sitting up the moment before; the nurse was holding her propped up—she said she was so tired of lying. She had been quite laughing, the nurse said."

"Almost laughing," corrects Sybilla, who has forgotten to lie down upon her sofa, and is sitting on a hard chair like anyone else.

"Quite laughing," continues Cecilia, "at her own arm for being so thin. She had pushed up her sleeve to look at it, and had said something—something quite funny, only the nurse could not remember the exact words—and then, all in a minute, she called out, in quite an altered voice, 'The salts! Quick! Quick!' and her head just fell back, and she was gone!"

"And she had not bid one of us good-bye!" cries Sybilla, breaking into a loud wail.

Then comes a dreadful and incongruous flash of that ridiculous, which is the underlining to all our tragedies, across Jim's mind at this last lament. The going, "taking no farewell," naturally seems to Sybilla the most terrible feature in the whole case, to her who has so repeatedly taken heartrending last farewells of her family.

"Who would ever have thought that I should have survived her?" pursues Sybilla, still sobbing noisily, and without the least attempt at self-control. Cecilia, who is sitting with her head on her arms resting on the table, lifts her tear-blurred face and answers this apostrophe in a voice choked with weeping.

"Jim always did; he always said that you would see us all out."

Again that dreadful impulse towards mirth assails Burgoyne. Is it possible that, at such an hour, he can feel a temptation to laugh out loud? But, later again, this horrible mood passes; later, when they have all grown more composed, when their tears run more gently, when their voices are less suffocated, and they are telling each other little anecdotes of her, aiding each other's memories to recall half-effaced traits of her homely kindness, of her noiseless self-denials, of her deep still piety.

They bring out her photographs, mourning over their being so few, and such old and long-ago ones. There are effigies by the dozen of Cecilia, and even touching presentments of Sybilla stretched in wasted grace upon her day bed; but it had never occurred to anyone—least of all to Amelia herself—that there is any need for her image to be perpetuated. And now they are searching out, as treasures most precious, the scanty faded likenesses that exist of her, planning how they can be enlarged, and repeated, and daintily framed, and generally done homage and tender reverence to.

Jim listens, occasionally putting in a low word or two, when appealed to to confirm or correct the details of some little story about her. But it seems to him as if his anguish only begins when the stream of their reminiscences turns into the channel of her love for him.

"Oh, Jim, she was fond of you! We were none of us anywhere, compared to you; she worshipped the ground you trod upon. We all knew—did not we, Sybilla?—did not we, father?—when you used to be away for so long, and wrote to her so seldom——Oh, I know!"—hastily—"that you were not to blame, that you were in out-of-the-way places, where there was no post: but there were sometimes long gaps between your letters; and we always knew—did not we?—when she had heard from you by her face, long before she spoke."

Next it is—

"How she fired up if anyone said anything slightingly of you: she never cared in the least if one abused herself; she always thought she quite deserved it; but if anybody dared to say the least disparaging thing of you"—it is pretty evident, though at the moment in his agony of preoccupation the idea does not occur to Jim, that this has not been an uncommon occurrence—"she was like a lioness at once."

"The saddest thing of all," says Sybilla, taking up the antiphonal strain, "is that she should have died just as she was beginning to be so happy!"

Just beginning to be so happy? And he might have made her heavenly happy so easily, since she asked so little—for eight years. The groan he utters is low in proportion to the depth of the fountain whence it springs, and they do not hear it. If they did, they would in mercy stop; instead, they go on.

"Did you ever see anything so radiant as she was—that last fortnight? She used to say that she was quite ashamed of being so much more fortunate than anyone else, she seemed always trying to make up to us for not being so happy as she. Oh, she was happy that last fortnight!"

This time he does not groan, he seems to himself to have passed into that zone of suffering which cannot be expressed or alleviated by the utterance of any sound. Perhaps, by-and-by, Cecilia dimly divines something, some faint shadow of what he is enduring; for she begins with well-intentioned labour to try to assert lamely that Amelia had always been happy, well, fairly happy, as happy as most people. You could not expect, in this dreadful world, to be always in the best of spirits, but she had never complained. And, oh! that last fortnight she had been happy, it was a pleasure to see her! And, oh, what a comfort it must be now to Jim to think that it was all owing to him.

She puts out her hand kindly to him as she speaks, and he takes it, and silently wrings it in acknowledgment of the endeavour—however clumsy—to lay balm upon that now immedicable wound.

He stays most of the night with them; and when at length, overcome with weariness and sorrow, they rise from their grief-stricken postures to go to bed, he kisses them all solemnly, even the old man. He has never kissed any of them before, except once or twice Cecilia on some return of his from the Antipodes, and because she seemed to expect it.

Three days later Burgoyne leaves Florence; and, as his arrival in the City of Flowers had been motived by Amelia alive, so is his departure to companion her dead.

END OF PART ONE.