The compact had been made only the day before, after Calvert had started for Milan, evidently--to his thinking--showing that it had been done with reference to something in Loyd’s last letter. “Strange that she did not consult me upon it,” thought he; “I who have been her chief counsellor on everything. Perhaps the lease of my confidence has expired. But how does it matter? A few hours more, and all these people shall be no more to me than the lazy cloud that is hanging about the mountain-top. They may live or die, or marry or mourn, and all be as nothing to me--as if I had never met them. And what shall _I_ be to _them_, I wonder?” cried he, with a bitter laugh; “a very dreadful dream, I suppose; something like the memory of a shipwreck, or a fire from which they escaped without any consciousness of the means that rescued them! A horrid nightmare whose terrors always come back in days of depression and illness. At all events, I shall not be ‘poor Calvert,’ ‘that much to be pitied creature, who really had some good in him.’ No, I shall certainly be spared all commiseration of that kind, and they’ll no more recur willingly to my memory than they’ll celebrate the anniversary of some day that brought them shame and misfortune. “Now then, for my positively last appearance in my present line of character! And yonder I see the old dame on the look-out for me; she certainly has some object in meeting me before her nieces shall know it--Land me in that nook there, Onofrio, and wait for me.” “I have been very impatient for your coming,” said she, as he stepped on shore; “I have so much to say to you; but, first of all, read this. It is from the vicar.” The letter was not more than a few lines, and to this purport: he was about to quit the home he had lived in for more than thirty years, and was so overwhelmed with sorrow and distress, that he really could not address his thoughts to any case but the sad one before him. “‘All these calamities have fallen upon us together; for although,’ he wrote, ‘Joe’s departure is the first step on the road to future fortune, it is still separation, and at our age who is to say if we shall ever see him again?’” “Skip the pathetic bit, and come to this. What have we here about the P. and O. steamers?” cried Calvert. “‘Through the great kindness of the Secretary of State, Joe has obtained a free passage out--a favour as I hear very rarely granted--and he means to pay you a flying visit; leaving this on Tuesday, to be with you on Saturday, and, by repairing to Leghorn on the following Wednesday, to catch the packet at Malta. This will give him three entire days with you, which, though they be stolen from us, neither his mother nor myself have the heart to refuse him. Poor fellow, he tries to believe--perhaps he does believe--that we are all to meet again in happiness and comfort, and I do my best not to discourage him; but I am now verging on seventy--’”