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."